I’ll tell you all my secrets but I’ll lie about my past (Tom Waits)
Tzuki Garbian’s drawings bring to the surface of drawing histories - stories - of paintings. Painterly moments that are gathered in order to construct a drawing. A kind of reversal: from painting to drawing. From the ‘thing itself’ to its study, to the preparation. The drawings conjure, summon, host, and organize what composes a painting. That is to say, it is an (drawing) exhibition in which the hero is painting. And we may add modern painting, for these are drawings of paintings from the Renaissance onward, paintings that accompany the evolution of the modern era in the West. Paintings from history and research.
Heroes, as is well known, appear through their actions, work, defiance, the traces they leave, the history they help to shape. They become heroes knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or by force. Their heroism is intertwined in their character, their unique characteristics, their life circumstances. These are not secrets, gossip or justification for the hero is recognized by his actions, not by hiding. He belongs to the public not the private, to what shows itself rather than hides. And Garbian’s drawings gather these gestures, marks, impressions, left by his hero the painting, like ‘circumstantial evidence’. (Evidence of an action, no less than evidence of the context.) Here, an image appears to balance the composition, there, a twisted organ as a testament to the artist’s enjoyment, here an attempt to distinguish shades and tonality of categories (black and white.) This is how the drawing collects those gestures and impressions to build borrowed, fabricated histories, sometimes scientifically supported, but mostly pictorial. They are there for a reason, a testament to the dominance of the painting over the painter. To the necessity that accompanies the craft of expression, and to the pleasure it provides.
The names of the drawings and the presented series - Pentimenti (regrets) - points to a concept that refers to creative processes. "The pentimento or regret, is, in the language of painting, a turn, an act of correction that the artist takes during the work of painting. For the most part, the pentimento is hidden and only over the years does the paint, which gains transparency, reveal a hand or a face in a different position, an early representation of a garment, object or other pictorial detail that emerges under the top layer. Sometimes, the exposure takes place in the laboratories of the researcher in technologies that reveal the hidden to the eye: traces of withdrawal, pigment or brush stroke, hesitation and turning in the steps of creation. It is difficult to imagine, and not only in the world of painting, a creative journey that does not confront the dimension of doubt, the question of responding to a mistake, the desire to improve, the need to disguise, erase or regret. Pentimento, to be precise, belongs to the category of change that occurs in the circles of the creative process, derived from the struggles of the painter and subject to the painter's private and intimate decision.”
The opposite move that Garbian takes - from the painting to the drawing - is like taking the (theological) concept of repentance from the painter and transposing it to the painting. Reveals its aesthetic nature. From the intention to the result. From consciousness to matter. from the hidden process to the product. From the place where you can regret, consider and change your mind, to the moments when the painting meets its instinct, confronts it, overcomes it. Moments of necessity, where the action is decisive by its very nature. Leaves an impression, without regrets. as in drawing.
The painting, the hero of the exhibition, exists in the range between the consciousness of regret and the insight that what has been done cannot be undone. In the range between guilt and sorrow, between hope and redemption and taking responsibility. Between the tormented and relishing soul and the body and matter that offer hardships and pleasures. This is how Garbian leads the drawings from the Memento Mori, from the memory of finality, to the other side of the action, to the painting, the hero of the action, who demands: Carpe Diem.
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It seems that for Garbian the painting is a living being, almost human. You can say: "He himself". Sometimes a side in the struggle, sometimes a leader in his own battles. Either way, these are emotional relationships of give and take that are forged during preparation, study and use ('imitation'). Intimate relations. Relationships that require ethics. (That will settle the narcissistic remorse, the enemy of intimacy.)
The concern of ethics is in the intervention and the shaping of human behavior, in the identification of tendencies and traits and paying attention to their use. Ethics involves attention and listening, repetition of actions, insistence and persistence and failure and overcoming. In instilling habits. Ethics accompanies the action, in the living space between remorse and no remorse, all the way to the result. (It belongs to the pedagogical space.)
From an ethical point of view - that of Garbian collecting the traces of the presence of his hero, the painting - the action is what it is. It builds images, scenes, maintains relationships, evokes memories, creates changes, leaves traces. From the ethical point of view, that of the painter who paints pictorial moments, the pictorial action realizes itself and thus testifies of itself. Beyond explanation and beyond regret. Gives herself - as a potential, as a preparation and study, as an aspiration for better, for more beautiful - for the benefit of the drawing. And it is from the logic of 'self-realization' that one can approach the craft of perception and composition of the painting - in the past, in the present, and in the future to come.
Garbian’s drawings of regrets allow the painting, the hero of the exhibition, to present itself: to be present. Present as an excess of discovery. Present as conjunction and addition, as a mere action. More than once, present to the point of disappearance, an atmosphere and nothing else, relationships between spots, echoes between layers. And allow us - who stand in front of the space of 'no regrets' - to feel it. Observe his (the painting’s) ways of action. Learn from the struggles he faced. Accompany him in his agony. To enjoy the fruits of his success: a little quiet time - full of drama - of reflections about the 'self'. (And its realization in public, for the public.)
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