"What Peter Z. Malkin presents here is
an 'illustrated book.' I cannot recall any book like it in the history
of Israeli art. 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
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 instinctive 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."
Adam Baruch
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