Yishai Jusidman at Galeria Ramis Barquet - Brief Article

In this exhibition, titled "en/treat/ment," young Mexican painter Yishai Jusidman explored art's part as an intermediary between self and other. Fifteen modestly sized rectangular vertical panels (all 1998) painstakingly worked in tempera, not absent solitary seated individuals dressed in public way clothes. All but two grasp books open to reproductions of famous paintings from Western art history. Each panel is accompanied by dint of another, smaller painting that functions as a caption: upon a light gray ground, white lettering provides the artist's name and birth date, the date and medium of the work, and the initials of the depicted individual along with a lengthy clinical description. The bring under rules of these paintings are all patients in a Mexico City psychiatric hospital and have manifold diagnoses that collectively form a virtual catalogue of mental disorder. Just direct the eye for example, at poor RR afflicted with "hebephrenic schizophrenia accompanied by means of autistic psychopathy, semantic dissociation, psychalgia and uranomanic delusions."

This contemporary medical exactitude is coupl with an artistic sensibility more akin to that of the 19th hundred Theodore Gericault's portraits of monomaniacs from the early 1820 similarly conjoined the greatest in quantity up-to-date medical terminology with a humanizing, empathetic portrayal. The palette of somber earth tones favored by the agency of both painters deepens the stylistic affinity. Jusidman has learned Gericault's exercise well; it is not thus much a matter of depicting one's subdues with an abstract "dignity," on the contrary of simply showing them as they are, without bias or favor. a certain quantity of like A.M., with her asymmetrical face and tightly hurt body, appear visibly disturbed, on the contrary many of the best works portray individuals with no apparent sign of psychosis. The narcoleptic paranoid MC in skirt and denim jacket with a scarf dashingly thrown above her shoulder, carefully presents an illustration of individual of Mondrian's austere paintings; she could be an art lover anywhere.

The art reproductions, of course, separate Jusidman's throw out from Gericault's. The latter painted bust-length portraits, concentrating all the expression upon his sitters' faces. By contrast, Jusidman mediates our interaction with his controls through the illustrations he has chosen for them. Sometimes those choices appear like a variety of the pathetic fallacy--Jusidman might well associate a "delirious anxiety of immanent death" with Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis--but, more importantly, the offered illustrations are alternatives to the gelid clinical descriptions as "representations" of the sitters. still a sympathetic union between them and us may be short-circuited by the agency of Jusidman's controlling presence in each work. And the portraits of the sum of two units patients who refused to be depicted with an art reproduction of Jusidman's choice may be the greatest in quantity eloquent of all.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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