Critiques

 

​

East and West

 

Elam brings an original and surprising mix of the East and Western roots, through a contemporary approach. The cosmic conception that the world we live is the tenth dimension of the tenth emanation that creates the world (or worlds), and this dimension is characterized by the diversity and contradiction of elements, in material and psychological sense, is based in the deepness of the ancient Jewish tradition. To express the struggle of men to overcome this dimension of conflicts throughout the unification that expresses the upper worlds in an artistic sense, Noah Elam feels the need to put together different materials or expressions until reach the unity. The smallest detail comes to be indispensable to have the whole, harmonic but in the border of the instability, seductive but dangerous, life and death.

 

Elam moved to New York from Jerusalem's Old City, was born in Brazil, where he started his career. Elam's works are part of important private collections and museum's permanent collections worldwide, including MASP - Museum of São Paulo, Brazil.

 

Lucien Krief

Art dealer - Jerusalem

 

 

​

 

 

TAMING TIGERS: NOAH ELAM’S VISIONARY PAINTING

 

​

         What immortal hand or eye                                                        

   Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?                                                                                                                                                                    William Blake, The Tiger

 

 

As far as the classical-romantic artistic tradition is concerned, modern avant-garde movements from the 20th century can be regarded as an explosive de-framing process of all its forms as well as its contents. This de-framing process is linked not only to abstractionism, but mainly to all kinds of anti-representational artistic trends and propositions that attempted to end up the separation between art and life in order to rebuild human society and civilization in its entirety. Of course, Marcel Duchamp was probably the first modern artist that fully understood the radical aims and consequences of this process, hence the central role he played in the conceptualization of the high modernist period that stretches out from the 1910s to the 1970s. However, the last thirty or forty years in the history of art have seen a clear exhaustion of this process, an exhaustion generally called postmodernism, faute de mieux.

Late 20th century postmodernism is the unexpected, collateral negative effect of the radical modernist de-framing of the artistic field. Apart from the fact that the modernist project of bringing together art and life - through the end of the representational logics that ruled the arts until the late 19th century – was doomed to fail due to its strong ties to all revolutionary social and political movements that went along with it and that also had clamorously failed, one can agree with the cinema theoretician and practitioner Jean-Louis Comolli that without framing there’s no way to really see anything. This means that the modernist de-framing process that trespassed all the arts during the 20th century was just the negative side of a project that should have provided also new positive possibilities of artistic visions; instead, it led to a post-modernist absence of aesthetical criteria and rigor that is a symptom of today’s blindness and impossibility of envisioning new forms of art, new forms of thought and new worlds to live in. 

Noah Elam’s new set of paintings is a major artistic attempt to try to re-frame contemporary art in order to envision new ways of seeing. One could compare his aesthetical project with the kabbalistic notion of tikkun olam: if modern art’s de-framing process is a kind of artistic shevirat hakelim that broke the “vases” of classical and romantic traditional ways of framing the world in order to represent it, Noah Elam’s painting is conceived as a way to restore art in its original powers of framing and representing the world. 

This mystical as well as artistic endeavor is closely related to William Blake’s romantic legacy and criticism of the classical tradition of artistic representation. It’s not a coincidence that Taming Tigers is the title of one of Noah Elam’s fifteen paintings displayed at this exhibition, since Blake symbolized the blindness and destruction of his own times in the image of the Tiger. For him, the figure of the tiger represented the enigma of evil in a world created by a true loving deity, as it is expressed by the beautiful verses “When the stars threw down their spears, and water'd heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”  

Noah Elam’s work tries to cope with the actual contemporary world - and its many different forms of blindness and destruction - in a visionary attempt to restore to Man his powers of seeing. In order to understand his artistic démarche, the Hegelian concept of aufhebung can be useful here, for his paintings are a way to overcome the artistic impasse provoked by postmodernism without simply returning to the futile and naïve avant-garde experiments so characteristic of the golden times of late modernism. At first sight, his return to the figurative image and the plurality of forms and themes that are shown in his paintings may seem to be just another avatar of the postmodern inflation of images that are so common in nowadays galleries and art museums, but, in a more thorough and closer look, his work displays a thematic freshness and a liberty of formal treatment that is a symptom of something else, a savage and desperate ultimate attempt to reinstate contemporary figurative painting in its lost ability to represent and understand the world we are living in the 21st century. 

Noah Elam’s attempt to re-frame contemporary art in order to restore our ability to see is strongly based on the modernist conception of a freely organized, shattered non-perspective shaping of the space: echoes of Picasso’s Guernica can be felt in his paintings, as well as traces of the way the expressionist painter Luis Áquila unfolds the space of his abstract paintings into many a different layer of colors and forms. Also, the richness of Noah Elam’s colors is clearly reminiscent of the Brazilian land and its highly contrasted lights and shadows, bringing to his visions the chromatic power that was already present in other modernist traditions such as the fauves, the orphism proposed by Sonia and Robert Delaunay and, of course, Chagall. But, probably, the main modernist influence here comes from the surrealists, especially from De Chirico and his way of using figures in a de-contextualized manner in order to generate unexpected possibilities of meaning, especially in his ironical references to the classical tradition. In this respect, Noah Elam’s vision of The Cage, with a Greek-like temple – or prison - at the center of its framing is quite emblematic. 

As we said before, though, Noah Elam’s painting is not an attempt to go back to modernism while overlooking the stalemate into which post-modern art had sunken in. The overwhelming number of wide open or wide shut eyes in the faces he depicts, sometimes in the very same picture, side by side, is the most eloquent visual symbol of his true artistic ambition, which is restoring to Man his real ability to see and to express the great difficulty of achieving it in our contemporary times. The highly symbolic contents of these visions has not been properly interpreted yet, but it is significant, for the moment, to remind the reader that symbolism is precisely the artistic movement that lays at the edge of the modernist explosion, at the end of the 19th century. 

Does that mean that Noah Elam should be considered a symbolist artist? We'd like to think so, but the artist himself is too smart to engage in such theoretical talk about his own visions. He knows very well that the art one makes is always greater than our own limited selves, and that’s why his own name functions as a key symbol to the entirety of his body of work, a symbol to which we’d like to offer a possible interpretation: according to Genesis (10,22), Elam is one of the sons of Shem, son of Noah. He is, therefore, the grandson of Noah, and the bringing together of these two names into one single name may symbolize, precisely, the overcoming of the tension between father and son (modernism and postmodernism, for example) in a third, reconciled, generation of human beings. Also, the tenth chapter of Genesis is the very last one before the story of Babel Tower, a mystical narrative about the shattering of the human race’s unity and the beginning of the feud between nations, cultures and languages. What better symbol of Noah Elam’s artistic project than to name himself after the period that comes right before the mystical (and anthropological) process of shevirat hakelim.                                                                                          

 

Ivan Capeller

PhD, Professor at the University of Rio de Janeiro

Brazil