Isaac Celnikier – Artworks

With his means – those, weak in the face of history, constituted by the practice of an art and knowledge of the history of this discipline – Isaac Celnikier does not show a limit; at least, he does not allow that which he shows to occupy in our space and our time a place and a moment that we could look at as objects. I look at his works; they challenge even my right to set myself up as a subject.

For more than twenty years, he hesitated to put into practice the post-war teachings he had received at the Beaux-Arts in Prague, perhaps wavering before the possibility of entrusting this modern conception of creation in art with the task of figuring what, for him, could not and should not be.
With these rejected means and this struggle against himself, he lived through the half-century from 1945 to the end of the 1990’s, advancing in the colours of his own material and technological triumphs, relegating tragedy to the sidelines with tragedy.
For some, it was a time to remember, for others to forget.
For Isaac Celnikier, it was the moment to switch from painting to engraving, to abandon his natural talent, his acquired pictorial powers, polychromy… to limit his aesthetic ambition to an imitation that would belong to him alone, and in a single movement, to purge copperplate engraving of the techniques it offers as well as the visual vertigo it promises.

Does this creative asceticism before us serve as a reminder of the balance between black and white in etching ?
Isaac Celnikier’s answer to the commonplace question of the second half of the 20th century: “Can we write – create – after Auschwitz ?” is not to draw “after” the event, but to work on the possibility of an aftermath, of memories worried by the absolute, vibrant and irreconcilable.