GRAND SCHOOL

Many artists aim to bring balance to a world in flux. One of the most powerful tools at an artist’s disposal is the activation of the symbols and lost truths of our inherited collective unconscious. It is the power of symbols which break both binding dogma and enlist human potential to incur necessary change. Today, we face the implementation of one of the most radical changes for human history with AI threatening to surpass our human skills while self-proclaiming an autonomous consciousness, meanwhile reinforcing and recreating the authoritarian structures it promises to replace. On the eve of this seismic change, the artist Avner Chaim seeks balance by immersing us in human innocence and wonder, choosing bright contrasts of color and texture for fish freely swimming in the sea. The gallery becomes an aquarium of delights where we regress into an earlier state of consciousness before the ego differentiated itself from the world of objects keenly articulated in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents.  Chaim’s dense walls of bright swimmers bring to life Freud’s “oceanic feeling”- the state of wholeness with eternity.  It is here where we are reminded of the ecstasies which may never be mechanically mimicked.

 Paradoxically, Avner's quest to reclaim the fleeting esplanades of joy is the result of a friendship with a survivor of humanity's darkest hour. Avner's focus on the fish as a central currency of meaning comes from their teenage years meeting the Yad Veshem Memorial artist Naftali Bezem. Bezem, born in Essen in 1924, had been miraculously saved from the Nazi transports and joined the 5th Aliyah to Israel at the dawn of Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland. His parents, who could not secure visas, perished at Auschwitz. Joining a generation of survivors who battled the torment of survivor guilt, his artistic oeuvre saw himself as "duty-bound to record that horror for all time, [where] aesthetic values serve only as the means of embodying his intentions." Like Chagall, who enlisted the fish as a significant symbol in his mystic cannon, Bezem designated it as a central theme, symbolizing the silenced cries of murder.

As a second-generation Sabra, Avner feels empowered to deconstruct the psychic hold of the Nazi era while reclaiming the mystic Judaic cannon of symbols, offering an invocation of psychic healing through his free-hand mark-making. His show at Lauren Powell Projects creates immersion in the liberated joy of its salon-style walls that submerge one in an intoxicatingly vibrant sea, highlighting diverse states of being: mischievous, blissful, and swimming with impunity and elation. The deeper underpinnings of this approach begin when the artist used the leftover paints of a previous series in his oeuvre that satirized the swastika - a reductive act to reclaim the kidnapped symbol from its reversal as the ultimate symbol of evil. This knife-edge duality regarding things seemingly benign that carry both a history of violence and the seeds of resolution is territory that this artist does not fear to tread.  In so doing, Avner's recontextualization of this archetype alchemizes the powers of both the tormentor and tormented into a liberated world that castrates its power to harm by providing a context in which light, fun, play, imagination, and the natural world reign, returning it to its inceptive meaning.

Lauren Powell Projects is known for an ability to create immersive surroundings that bathe you within the psyche of their artists. Avner’s multitudinous aquarium shyly positioned on Hollywood Boulevard reveals an unexpected profusion of fish densely marked with pointillist patterns and primordial mandalas not native to their species. Some of these paintings sport emotionally benign cartoonish features while others carry brains on their crowns, enlisting the impulses of the free-form imagination seeking to find meaning through repetition. In this way Avner is an inheritor of Yad Vashem's goal to restore Tikkun Olam, returning us to the waters of a lost joy and imaginative abandon, where differences of color, form, and purpose are celebrated and oddities reveal our journey’s purpose through cipher. 

Art historian and critic Andrea Gyorody comments “These look like the work of an artist who’s having fun, moving away—as an Israeli, Jewish artist—from obviously Jewish (trauma-informed) content, though of course if you know the backstory, these paintings are only fun on the surface.” His efforts symbolize the reclaiming of the fish, representing a new generation that honors the horrors of the past but invokes healing through a vigorous encounter of color in combination with the rejection of the Cartesian laws that imprison and destroy us. This is the ultimate testament to survival. After all, history speaks to victimhood as a breeding ground of revenge, allowing the cycle of atrocity to continue.

It is a radical act to bring forth and bare the raw emotions and the vulnerability of our humanity, for it is only here where we can truly feel the deepest dangers of the machine and its own propensity for what Arendt theorized as the "banality of evil" and what Ginsberg feared as Moloch. On the eve of global seismic change, replete with its terrors, Chaim’s show proclaims there is still time to swim towards the salvation of unadulterated rapture.

Essay written by independent curator and art historian Laura Whitcomb of Label Curatorial.