Beautiful pastel colors of yellow, blue, and sand beige with a Mantegna-like linear foreshortening entice the viewer to quickly engage with this Bak painting. However, the initial attraction leads to a jarring and repugnant reversal upon recognizing this structure as an autopsy table littered with pieces of sliced fruit, apples or pears, textured like the stone of the surface below them. The table is almost anthropomorphic with a solid central portion, thinner lateral parts distally and appendage-like stones with straps attached in the foreground. The prominent drainage collection hole provides an ominous and unsettling confirmation of what happens on this slab, as precariously balanced portions of lacerated fruit teeter on the brim.
Twisting the old adage, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”, Bak’s title more likely addresses Dr. Joseph Mengele and the horrors perpetrated by him and his colleagues on concentration camp prisoners during the Holocaust. The straps seen here are not a standard need for autopsy, thus implying the restraints used as part of systematic torture performed on living people.
This is a very dark and difficult Bak painting which by design, colorfully grabs the viewer’s attention but delivers a morbidly serious message. Memory is not always an easy process!
Dr. Carl M. Herbert (Guest Writer)
BAK a Day, September 12, 2023
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Although this painting presents a cluster of different-colored, variably sliced pears, its title alludes to the common proverb, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” implying an appeal for good health. Bak’s pears easily substitute for most any reference to apples and as a part of his visual lexicon, are symbolic representations of individuals, life forces, and at times collectively a family or population.
Using an exaggerated, foreshortened perspective, these pears rest at the foot of a stone or tile slab with a prominent drain giving this supportive structure the feel of a morgue or autopsy table. Intermingled with the dissected pears are straps or restraints attached to dislodged tiles invoking a darker insidious process. With beautiful colors and engaging lines of perspective, this painting gracefully draws the viewer into an unexpected conflict. Although pears as fruit are traditionally sliced and pleasurably consumed, the pears as people symbolically shown here reference involuntary restraint, torture, and probable death. Is the doctor who should be kept away Dr. Josef Mengele?
Additionally for this piece, Bak, who is influenced by a deep knowledge of and rich appreciation for art from the Italian Renaissance, invokes all the religious intrigue of a late 15th century painting by Andrea Mantegna, “Lamentation of Christ”. Using a unique dramatic foreshortened perspective, that painting presents Christ crucified, lying in a feet-first position at eye level on a marble slab. Christ’s stigmata are prominent, and his unique positioning creates an enhanced interpretative tension. Once past the initial colorful elegance of “Keeping The Doctor Away”, a similar interpretative tension arises mandating recognition and confrontation of the evil humankind is capable of committing. The evidence of torture and deliberate killing on bodies being contemporaneously exhumed in Ukraine confirms such evil continues.
Dr. Carl M. Herbert (Guest Writer)
BAK a Day, October 11, 2022
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