The Paintings of Martin Berkovitz - Whether art is expressed through theater, literature, music or any other medium its essence is illusion.

Essays / Illusion, Arts Essential Magic


Whether art is expressed through theater, literature, music or any other medium its essence is illusion. When we watch a movie we don't see it as light playing on a flat screen, we are transported. Transport, illusion, that is the core of the art experience. Art is the art of making connections, an artist with his themes, an artist with his audience.

Since Paleolithic times when cave artists painted bison and other animals they did so to establish contact with those animals. Their art was a shamanic communion with those forms. In their case it was to ask permission, to express gratitude, and to apologize to the animal for taking its life in order to give life to the human community.

At its core art has continued this process down through the millennia. To paint a portrait, a still life, a landscape was to connect to and preserve what the artist and the community felt mattered, what was loved, cherished and appreciated. All religious art from whatever tradition produced images to preserve and pass down to unborn generations what it held as sacred true and beautiful. It was all a communion.

As a painter, I'm always aware of the magic of expressing a three dimensional world on a two dimensional surface, it's enchantment. I'm also aware of the psychic dimension of this process. If an artist genuinely and deeply feels his themes he not only connects to the subject but literally pulls an aspect of its energy into the work of art. When people say a work of art is genuine that is what they really mean, the subject and its artistic reflection are identical. The essence has been connected to, caught and preserved.

With painting or sculpture that is abstract the process is different. In some cases oblique references to the outer and inner world are preserved but in most instances the art becomes self-referential. This approach is unique to the twentieth century and must be considered the great experiment and innovation of that period. But to all things there is a price. By isolating a work of art and making it self-contained, stressing only its formal esthetics reduces it to object status.

All figurative art also has an object aspect. Paintings and sculptures are undoubtedly esthetic objects. But the object aspect also has that larger reflective dimension that transports us out of our immediate reality. When an art work becomes self-referential it looses the connectedness that is art's core.

I've always felt that there is a different function that separates art from craft. Craft creates utilitarian objects that if they are truly successful are also beautiful and transformative to our environments. Art is essentially about transport and illusion, craft about object making. This in no way means one is superior to the other, their functions, however, are different and in some rare cases they may even overlap.

During the twentieth century there was a strong movement to reduce art to its formal plastic elements and to make those elements the new subject matter. This resulted in many memorable images and gave art an enhanced physically imposing presence and power. This was an inevitable step in art's unfoldment, but at the same time it sacrificed art's power of illustion, it's potent magic.

Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century I think it entirely possible to extract from modernist abstraction all its lessons, innovations and power and fuse these with the reflective connectedness that has been art's great gift and glory since the stone age.

I believe such a synthesis will be the ultimate flowering of all those new possibilities discovered in the last century. To wed an enhanced sense of physical presence and power to the magic power of transport and illusion is to create a new hybrid of extraordinary creative potentiality.

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