In art, being and nothingness are trapped in a whirlpool: in music, the sounds depend on the silent intervals between them; literature and poetry make desperate attempts to describe that whose very nature is to be overlooked by language. The word, it is well known, kills the object. Around each letter there is an ocean of white void, which lends it meaning, and in painting there is a struggle to give visual expression to man's experience, whether internal (psyche/mind) or external (God); to paint not the world, as it were, but its heart or its back.
In his text for the exhibition "With the Back to the Viewer," Yitzhak Livneh wrote: "The back has long been linked to the concept of abstraction. Therefore, I was not surprised to find in the catalogue of David Ginton's exhibition centered on the reverse side of paintings, a quote from the Book of Exodus. God says to Moses on Mount Sinai: 'thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen' (Exodus 33:23)."2 Livneh explains that this is a metaphor for the abstract essence of God; an iconoclastic, image-negating metaphor. While he was obviously right, he did not go far enough. It is not only God's abstract essence, but the void, the blind spot underlying divinity. If God reveals His face to us, that is the meaning, the grace; his back means abandoning us to our destiny, indicating his absence. Being and void are trapped in a whirlpool. Revelation of God's aspect lies in nature images, His absence or back—in the abstract.
I would like to argue that painting the reverse side of things is not only an age-old tradition in the history of art, but also a field for spiritual and theological discussions regarding the negative aspect in divinity. From the young Michelangelo, who places the baby Jesus with his muscular back to the viewer in his first marble work, shifting the focal point to his emotionally detached mother, confronting us with a god who turned his back on us, and Andrea Mantegna's 1492 Descent into Limbo, at almost the same historic moment, where the appearance of Jesus with his back to the viewer raises questions such as: Where was God in the Holocaust? Where was he during the Plague? What does "hester panim" (hiding of God's face) look like?; through God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in the scene of the Creation of the Moon, with his back to us (it is difficult to understand today how radical that image was to 1512 eyes), an image in which the world is not deterministic, God is a two-sided coin: good and bad, present and absent; to Rembrandt's The Raising of Lazarus (ca. 1632), an engraving by the man who was excommunicated from church, who looks at the Divine wonder from the outside, seeing the darkened back of grace. And lo, here too, our God too, who has neither body nor image, was rendered from behind!
David Ginton (b. 1947, Tel Aviv; lives and works in Tel Aviv), with his trompe l'oeil verso paintings, succeeded in painting the concealment of God's face (hester panim), the absence of grace, the failure of the representation apparatus, God's back. In this context, one should stress the link between the ability to create images, signs and symbols, and the ability to give meaning to the world. Silence, breaking the chain of signifiers, and the loss of meaning are among the signs of madness. God is ultimately responsible for meaning. In the absence of an Other of meaning, the card tower of meaningful life collapses. This is sometimes referred to in psychoanalysis as "trauma." For example, how is one to depict Auschwitz? Or, on a smaller scale—Prime Minister Rabin's assassination? Indeed, Ginton has a painting of the reverse side of a canvas with the date of the assassination, as if saying, one is no longer seeking meaning here. God has no face here. The same is true of the painting quoting Henri Fantin-Latour's 1864 Homage to Delacroix—how can a painter depict his own death? (A topic I have been engaging with for many years).
Ginton's solution is a canvas full of painting, but empty of painting. Figurative yet abstract; often containing a cross (as in the painting quoting Louis Marin from 2000); a painting of all that cannot be depicted. Western painting has been depicting God, his face, his body, for 500 years. Ginton portrays his back. Could poet Yehuda Atlas have been wrong, and in fact only those who look at me from behind know who I am?
