The title "Definitive" suggests that Bak will provide the viewer explicit answers. However, in typical Bak fashion, the visual narrative he creates only elicits further questions.
The landscape is set in motion: a smokestack appears mid-fall, while phone lines are askew, and smoke billows from the left side of the composition. The painting is a snapshot of a world mid-collapse, containing a sense of starting anew, while still eliciting a lingering past. The smoke embodies a sense of simultaneous change and memory, as it transitions into a solid, rock-like form.
Central to the composition is a group of figures huddled together. They appear trapped, stuck between a collapsed smokestack and a pile of debris. For the most part, their faces are downturned, evoking anxiety and confusion. The only faces that remain fully visible is a man with a white beard and brown cap looking outwards, standing alongside a young boy who is turned towards the man, as if awaiting answers.
In direct opposition, a solitary figure stands outside the collection of buildings. He holds a couple suitcases in his hand and a bag sits at his feet. Unlike the man looking outward amongst the crowd, he is on his way to something beyond the wreckage. The ambiguous surroundings make it unclear whether the figure is escaping too a better fate.
In the foreground on the right, a stone figure mirrors the man with the suitcases. He has a similar expression on his face, with eyes shielded by a hat. The stone figure evokes a sense of foreboding, while linking past to present. amidst collapse and renewal, the past mirrors an ever-changing world.
Lilly Harvey (Guest writer)
BAK a Day, November 27, 2022
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A totally definite title that does not help me in any way to enter this maze of images. Here a hat, there a hat.
The traveler with suitcases in hand slinks quietly onto the platform to nowhere. The gathering of figures huddle amongst the ruins of destroyed houses and an uprooted chimney belching smoke with clear Xs marking the spots of loss.
The only definitive aspect of this scene is the brokenness of it all.
Only the people seem real. Have they somehow survived this cataclysmic experience? Stay tuned.
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