Take a look at our profile photos. We tend to photograph ourselves from the most flattering angle. In fact, we also face the mirror from the most flattering angle. We know ourselves from the profile pictures and smiles in the mirror which we stage. But the other, the hell called the other—he sees us when we forget to pull our belly in. When we are least representative: from the side, from the back; from above, when our nose looks large, or from below, when the contents of our nostrils can be seen. Sometimes an unexpected mirror is reflected in the mirror in front of us, or an irresponsible creep photographs us without permission, and our true appearance sneaks behind us like a criminal at night, and with it comes the repressed truth of our painful relationship with our appearance, with our image in the world, and with ourselves. Our ego, such a naughty stranger, taps on our shoulder. We turn around, and he's not there. Is he behind us? Worse still, he is within us.
Francis Bacon's portraits are the only ones in the history of art that capture this because of their deep Catholicism. In the disturbed, Caravaggio-esque, the wound-as-salvation sense of Catholicism; in the sense that the magic of this religion is the transubstantiation of the bread into the body of Jesus and the wine into his blood. That miracle, the god who is a tormented body, these divine torments—they assume the possibility of being within: being within magic, inside the mystical; in one boat with our visibility from the outside, with our foreignness to ourselves. The image and the imaginary come together here; the artist and the work.
This is not the impact of Cubism, it is not the camera, it is not Eadweard Muybridge, it is not an emotional expression, or Expressionism. It is an exorcism, followed by painting in oil on canvas of the demon as it leaves the body, because the demon is not a foreign entity that clings to the ego like a parasite; it is its ever-denied reality that seeks equal representation in the parliament of selves. It is that part of the self that always takes us by surprise.
Michel Platnic (b. 1970, France; immigrated to Israel in 1998; lives and works in Tel Aviv) departs from the premise that this is also possible for him; that he can cross the line between the experienced self and the self in the mirror; between the artist and the work. Platnic (like Akira Kurosawa before him, and Edouard Manet before Kurosawa, and Diego Velázquez before Manet) dives head first into the other's work, planting himself in it, masquerading, wearing make-up, disguising himself, spying. A Trojan horse, a virus, a foreign object. For that purpose he builds a set. He produces, directs, pretends, plays a role. And then something miraculous happens. A transubstantiation of representation: it becomes his work.
I happened to be a guest in one of these works. I was invited to be Francis Bacon's Lucian Freud in Platnic's work. I can only assume that Platnic invited me to be Freud because of the type of painter I am: libidinal, material, expressive, slightly macho, carrying with me some intellectual baggage (or at least a reputation). It was torture. For the angle, I was suspended from the wall at the waist. A prosthetic nose was fitted on my face, my hair was covered, my face was made up, my body was tied, and the garment was sewn directly onto my body. And then the endless shooting session. But all in all, there was no mistaking it: I was in. The line was crossed. I was, if only for a brief moment, an image.
In another series, Platnic worked with Egon Schiele's paintings. Schiele, like Bacon, is a symbol of the authentic modern artist. In his works, he expresses the existential anxiety of modern man, who has become alienated from his world, from his body. It is even a fear of sexuality and women (which makes him a particularly popular painter among adolescents, whose emerging sexuality frightens them). It is art of a humanity in crisis.
The entry into Schiele's world allows Platnic to add another stratum, another layer to his discussion of postmodern art's relations with modern art, or rather, post-faithful art with faithful art, or post-authentic art with authentic art. In these works one may get the impression that the contemporary artist cannot be himself, only in the garments of another artist. This is perhaps the reason why Platnic does not settle for being inside the work, but seeks to be the artist, in a self-portrait. Like a man who has a hard time telling his beloved that he loves her, so he invites her to a play, in which he plays a lover, and as he recites the playwright's words to the actress, he turns his gaze to his beloved in the audience. Indeed, this is exactly what Platnic does, when in the middle of Schiele's portrait he turns his gaze at us! This additional layer of the works gives us a peek into Platnic's inner world, completing the picture.
