Timur Tsaku
On Dreams and Visions
Timur Tsaku's paintings emerge like rogue stage sets, flitting into existence out of a black ground. A pair of figures appear: A cloaked being with the head of a dog, who is Haiya Kdusha, the Hebrew name for a holy being or angel, alongside a black-haired woman or child.
The images can be taken, in a sense, as analogs for creation and the manipulation, by the painter, of the effect of presence, which Tsaku expresses as the robed dog backed up by the female whose likeness he bases on his wife and daughter.
Tsaku, who was born in Uzbekistan, trained in the late 1980s at the Tashkent Art School and Benkov Art Institute for scenic design, both in Uzbekistan, before settling in Israel in 1991. He has painted scenes framed loosely as Old Testament allegories since 2001.
Theatrical scene-painting informs these black-and-white panels out of which forms emerge from a smoky, vague environment like the vapors of a cave or the dim washes of the unconscious. The tableaux have in common with Byzantine painting a flatness of silhouette and an elaborate patterning to the costumes the figures wear. In a parallel life, they might stage-set an opera in which the actors, part animal and part human, enact ancient dramas.
Tsaku appears to know, even may be consciously exploiting, the tendency to take things very literally even in stories designed to give play to the imagination.
"I believe that my images are understandable for everybody.
I depict images formed in my mind that relay a visual meaning of the external and internal world of my holy personages, and one that definitely differs from the canon," Tsaku writes.
The extent to which portraying a dog as an angel is a pun worthy of a surrealist, or an entirely serious depiction is essentially left up to a viewer. But what is worth remembering is that the animal has been sacred for millennia of human existence.
Sirius, the dog star and guide to travelers, is brightest in the sky. Hecate, the goddess of crossroads, went accompanied by dogs along pathways and byways. Egyptians believed that dogs led their souls into the underworld. And in our society, the scavenging dog and the pampered, Best in Show dog are the black and the white sides both of our consciousness and our ethical sets.
It is meaningful that Tsaku paints only in black-and-white--incidentally, the color of most dreams. He is engaged in a kind of instantaneous snare of our imaginations in which the title, always juxtaposing the holy and the mortal female or cherub, proposes a sacred context for content that is highly interpretive.
Depth psychologist James Hillman weighs in on the shift from many gods to one god that gave us such a censoring orthodoxy of high and low. His words might explain, in a phrase, the tremendous appeal of imagination, and the right to let frolic gods and dogs, women and children, with the freedom our dreams allow us.
" A full range of images, feelings and peculiar moralities are our actual psychic natures. They need no deliverance from evil if they are not imagined to be evil in the first place."
Ellen Berkovitch is a writer, art historian and a Ph.D. student in depth psychology.
Timur Tsaku's paintings emerge like rogue stage sets, flitting into existence out of a black ground. A pair of figures appear: A cloaked being with the head of a dog, who is Haiya Kdusha, the Hebrew name for a holy being or angel, alongside a black-haired woman or child.
The images can be taken, in a sense, as analogs for creation and the manipulation, by the painter, of the effect of presence, which Tsaku expresses as the robed dog backed up by the female whose likeness he bases on his wife and daughter.
Tsaku, who was born in Uzbekistan, trained in the late 1980s at the Tashkent Art School and Benkov Art Institute for scenic design, both in Uzbekistan, before settling in Israel in 1991. He has painted scenes framed loosely as Old Testament allegories since 2001.
Theatrical scene-painting informs these black-and-white panels out of which forms emerge from a smoky, vague environment like the vapors of a cave or the dim washes of the unconscious. The tableaux have in common with Byzantine painting a flatness of silhouette and an elaborate patterning to the costumes the figures wear. In a parallel life, they might stage-set an opera in which the actors, part animal and part human, enact ancient dramas.
Tsaku appears to know, even may be consciously exploiting, the tendency to take things very literally even in stories designed to give play to the imagination.
"I believe that my images are understandable for everybody.
I depict images formed in my mind that relay a visual meaning of the external and internal world of my holy personages, and one that definitely differs from the canon," Tsaku writes.
The extent to which portraying a dog as an angel is a pun worthy of a surrealist, or an entirely serious depiction is essentially left up to a viewer. But what is worth remembering is that the animal has been sacred for millennia of human existence.
Sirius, the dog star and guide to travelers, is brightest in the sky. Hecate, the goddess of crossroads, went accompanied by dogs along pathways and byways. Egyptians believed that dogs led their souls into the underworld. And in our society, the scavenging dog and the pampered, Best in Show dog are the black and the white sides both of our consciousness and our ethical sets.
It is meaningful that Tsaku paints only in black-and-white--incidentally, the color of most dreams. He is engaged in a kind of instantaneous snare of our imaginations in which the title, always juxtaposing the holy and the mortal female or cherub, proposes a sacred context for content that is highly interpretive.
Depth psychologist James Hillman weighs in on the shift from many gods to one god that gave us such a censoring orthodoxy of high and low. His words might explain, in a phrase, the tremendous appeal of imagination, and the right to let frolic gods and dogs, women and children, with the freedom our dreams allow us.
" A full range of images, feelings and peculiar moralities are our actual psychic natures. They need no deliverance from evil if they are not imagined to be evil in the first place."
Ellen Berkovitch is a writer, art historian and a Ph.D. student in depth psychology.