Peter Z. Malkin

Here We Are in Buenos Aires

"What Peter Z. Malkin presents here is an 'illustrated book.' I cannot recall any book like it in the history of Israeli art. Indeed, Malkin is not really part of this history, even though he is decidedly an Israeli. About thirty years ago, on the pages of this guidebook to South America, under the influence of the experience of capturing Adolf Eichmann, Malkin depicted the portraits of Eichmann, Hitler, and their henchmen. He drew these images from memory, from his personal biography, from a naive knowledge of drawing, from an obsession. He depicted the mass murderers, as well as their victims, the Jews, and landscapes.

"Malkin created dozens of oil pastels during the short time span of four months, before, during, and after the abduction of Eichmann. Surely there was something ritualistic about this almost religious spell of creativity.

"This obsessive, emotional drawing/painting, compressed on the pages of a guidebook - a small, and, at first glance, limiting format–seemed to Malkin at the time a kind of personal redemption and a private matter altogether. Today, however, seen from the dual distance of time and place, the full extent of its importance becomes evident, and it turns out to be, in my opinion, excellent, even unique, art.

"The opportunity for my encounter with Malkin arose through the media about two years ago. Thirty years had passed since Operation Eichmann, in which he was involved in actually trapping Eichmann. Now the facts could be published. I interviewed Malkin for a newspaper feature, and it was during this meeting that he showed me the book.

"At that time, I was curating the Israel Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. There I was presenting the sculptor Yaacov Dorchin, and my mind was preoccupied with iron, mass, gigantic proportions, and concepts such as posture, tension, space, and movement around the sculpture. Nonetheless, the transition to Malkin's dramatic, iconic, and at once naive and sophisticated images was instantaneous and easy, and I was stunned and fascinated by their impact.

"For Malkin's imagery possesses the power that is common to life and art. It is simultaneously realistic and surrealistic–precisely descriptive even as it verges on the visionary. It is constructed from the strands of present reality and from the strands of memory. It offers both a factual and poetic testimony. This is popular and, at the same time, high art–immediate, yet distanced. 

"The oil pastel medium, the clear contours, the distribution of colors, the composition, the placement of the figures on the page, the expressive approach, the literary and narrative qualities, the emotional and moral message, and the sweeping, artless execution: all these elements in combination forge the distinctive force of a highly communicative icon, creating in effect an epitome of "naive" art.

"Malkin sometimes covered only parts of the printed pages, leaving others–page numbers, sections of maps, full or fragmentary texts, and the heading, 'Argentina' - exposed. This juxtaposition of bare print and areas covered with color creates a unique texture–a texture that both announces the peculiar nature of this colored drawing and its physical foundation and provides a graphic substratum to the work, enriching as well as being enriched by it.

"It is of interest to note that Malkin's fascination with the 'printed ground' was completely spontaneous and detached from similar concepts in contemporary art, as they have, more recently, been manifested in Julian Schnabel's works on paper, for instance, or in those of Joshua Neustein.

"The fourth dimension of time, i.e., the time of the actual event, is  both present and absent on these pages. It is introduced only by our knowledge about the date of Eichmann's capture.

"This body of oil pastels, then, dissociated from a specific circumstance, is in every sense, from every point of view, painting."