Bak’s 2020 painting "Still" captures the artist’s talent in creating still life compositions that tantalize the senses and implore the art of questioning: What is it that I am looking at?
Pears: one a genuine, edible fruit and two others that pose as imposters with their wooden forms, attract attention to the left of the display; the variety of green hues evoke energy, growth, and fertility. Paired with these fruits is a human head that has been carved from stone. A kind of rust seems to flow from the top of his head, almost mimicking a nervous sweat. With eyes void of any character or vision, this head becomes decorative when viewed alongside the composition’s other elements.
Just to the right of the centerpiece, a hand with the stigmata holds our attention. Throughout his work, Bak has used the stigmata to symbolize ideas such as our universal mortality as humans or our sins, for which Jesus Christ was crucified. Positioned atop the table, Bak has placed in a thriving forest neighbored by a serene lake the brutalized hand seems to function as a warning. With his inclusion of a pitcher dripping in red fluid, Bak revisits and corrupts its themes of domesticity and comfort. Positioned between the stone head and weeping hand, the pitcher’s red fluid transforms into blood, perhaps that of Jesus Christ. This, in turn, brings to mind the Sacrament of Holy Communion, during which one consumes the “blood of Christ.” It may not be too unreasonable to assume that Still is a reevaluation of the Holy Communion and Bak has simply replaced the “Body of Christ” with pears, his iconic and symbolically charged motif. Perhaps Still is not a still life at all, but a depiction of an altar where pears are indicative of the Body of Christ. Once again, Bak has dared his audience to look within each of his carefully selected elements and find new meaning within them.
Lucy McGing (Guest writer)
BAK a Day, January 22, 2024
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Before Samuel Bak's second internment in the Vilna Ghetto, he and his family were saved by his maternal grandfather's sister, Janina, who had converted to Catholicism many years prior and had married a prominent Catholic. She convinced them to stay with the Benedictine sisters of Saint Catherine who had baptized Janina, and who agreed to hide them. There, Bak learned "how to be a good Catholic" under the tutelage of the nuns, and when he and his mother were forced to hide in an attic, he came into prolonged proximity with an image of a crucified Jesus Christ painted on a piece of wood.
Bak's use of the image of Christ and the stigmata is thus a symbol of this period, and a parallel between Jesus Christ's suffering as a Jewish man himself, and the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. In Still (2020), Bak depicts the stigmata as a disembodied stone hand bleeding from a small hole in the center of its palm, and the Eucharist as a large overflowing pitcher of wine (blood) and a pear with several bites taken out of it (body). Amongst the objects are several others, including a bust and three other pears. One is a large stone monument in the background, another thin cutout of a pear leans against the smooth marble head, and a third looks to be composed of three parts: a slice of pear on the bottom, scrap material in the center, and another pear as the top. The face of the bust is tightened into a grimace with a line between his eyebrows and bags beneath his eyes. His vacant eyes look towards the pitcher, whose entire top half is soaked in wine that drips into the cavern beneath the objects, barely evading the white cloth they all rest upon.
Yet this still life, without the "life," becomes simply still. Everything arranged in its place, there is a hopelessness to the ceremony, the blood of many more than just Christ falling into a void beneath. Without the golden goblet or the wafer, Christ becomes simply a man, a Jewish man, suffering.
Jocelyn Furniss (Guest Writer)
BAK a Day, March 1, 2023
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Although Sam was raised in a Jewish tradition, his paintings often include Christian iconography reflecting both the Old and New Testament writings.
Central to this painting is a moribund facial image or death mask?
The defining aspect, however, is the more viable appearing left hand with the classical penetration wound stigma of Christ Crucified. The foreground for this painting includes white cloth, perhaps part of a shroud, but placed adjacent to the solid blue vertical structure with a vee cut and a small round button?, perhaps the vestments of a priest. On either side of the facial image are a partially eaten pear and a pitcher stained and we assume filled with a red liquid. These would be the classical sacramental elements for celebrating Holy Eucharist, representing the body and blood of Jesus. New Testament teaching would say this tradition began with and celebrates the Last Supper. Sam has an edible pear, his symbol for hope and fecundity, as the sacrament but includes multiple other structural pear images made of wood, stone, or artificially constructed. The facial image itself has apparent leaves and could be viewed as a pear shape.
Do all these pieces create an image of sacrificial hope? Is “Still” a reflection of ceremonial persistence or simply the end of another life? In a broken world do symbolic religious rituals offer solace, hope or repair?“
Dr. Carl M. Herbert (Guest Writer)
BAK a Day, May 7, 2022
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