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Veil of Veronica

Myroslav Yahoda

Basic information

ID: Ж-7818
Author: Myroslav Yahoda
Name: Veil of Veronica
Date of creation: 1998
Technique: oil painting
Material: canvas oil
Dimensions: 130 x 100 cm (height x width)

Additionally

Type: painting
Provenance: Courtesy of Lviv City Coucil on the 95th anniversary of Lviv Art Gallery

Information about author

Author: Myroslav Yahoda
Artist's lifetime: 1957–2018
Country: Ukraine
Biography: Myroslav Yahoda (23 August 1957 – 12 March 2018) was one of the most consistent and original Lviv artists of the last third of the twentieth – early twenty-first centuries. In his mature period, the artist often deliberately avoided participating in group projects, and the curators who collaborated with him preferred solo exhibitions as a form that allowed the development of an original narrative of his visual world.
He studied at Ivan Fedorov Ukrainian Printing Institute (according to Volodymyr Stasenko – graduate of 1987). In his practice, he combined easel painting, graphic and poetic experiments, and turned to scenography, particularly in collaboration with Mariia Veres. Myroslav Yahoda's creative biography spans more than three decades of active exhibition activity: from the first painting exhibitions in Poland and Slovakia in the early 1990s (Lublin, Warsaw, Łódź, Poznań, Rzeszów, Wrocław, Medzilaborce) to major retrospectives of the 2010s. These include the exhibitions "I + God = A" ("Dzyga" Gallery, 2006), an individual space within the project "Red Book: Soviet Art in Lviv in the 1980s and 1990s" (PinchukArtCentre, 2018), the monumental retrospective "Am I Here – Am I There?!" (Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery, 2019) and the intimate yet emotionally expressive exhibition of the painting "Holodomor" in the Boim Chapel (2016).
It should be emphasised that the paintings and drawings by Myroslav Yahoda defy easy classification, and therefore researchers of the artist's work often use the artist's own neologisms, such as "Chereposlov" (the eponymous title of a 2002 poetry collection), to describe the author's individual optics. Crucial to understanding the artist's artistic cosmogony is the concept of "Distance Zero" (the eponymous title of a 2006 poetry collection) – a state in which a person exists on the boundary between the present and the infinite space of time, without clearly defined points of support, much like Redrick Schuhart from "Stalker" (for details, see http://www.ji.lviv.ua/n89texts/horunzha-dystanciya-nul.htm). The artist himself called this state "cosmic space" – a temporary stay outside the established coordinates of existence. In this sense, he is sometimes compared to Francis Bacon, for whom chance was more important than rational intellect: the images created by such art, in essence, defy mental comprehension in the manner inherent to them. Despite these frequent comparisons of Myroslav Yahoda's practice, the author himself was sceptical of Francis Bacon and believed that he lacked emotionality and humanity, noting the "mechanical" nature of his writing. Instead, he emphasised that for him, what was important in painting was not the finished canvas as a product, but rather the experience – and necessarily a difficult one – during the process of painting.
The early period of the artist's work, traditionally described as the second half of the 1980s and referred to as the "Dark Period", has a resonance with Myroslav Yahoda's expressionist poetry, with its characteristic two- and three-line neologisms, which are variations on a single theme: the human being exists simultaneously in several realities. A recurring theme in Myroslav Yahoda's work is loneliness, not as a psychological state, but as an existential constant that gradually "consumes" the individual and drives a simultaneous search for dissolution and one's own integrity. Researchers of his heritage describe the artist's time as the "Era of Universal Separations" (after Yukio Mishima, with whose translator, Grigory Chkhartishvili, Myroslav Yahoda was personally acquainted), in which true rarity and a miracle is not separation, but reunion.
Myroslav Yahoda's work is inextricably linked to a fundamental rejection of most attributes of modern consumer society, and this distance was for him not something external, but a way of life: the artist consciously distanced himself not only from people, but also from established iconographic and cultural conventions. This is a fundamental difference between his work and the mysticism and visionary style of Jakob Böhme (for details, see https://lvivgallery.org.ua/sites/default/files/verstka_yahoda_optimized.pdf): Myroslav Yahoda's art has a rather post-modernist character, and parallels should be sought not in esoteric traditions, but in the experience of American abstractionism and British expressionism.
The artist's oeuvre is often described in terms of "shocking content" – so sincerely does he work with the body and the boundaries of human existence. At the same time, scholars note that, despite his radical language, Myroslav Yahoda remains an organic artist, unique to Lviv – a city whose "climatic and socio-psychological conditions" contributed to the birth of art that is simultaneously meaningful and hopeless, yet rather apocalyptic in its essence.
Myroslav Yahoda often demonstratively turned to the work of the American musician Tom Waits, whose heavy, "painful" voice serves as an audio parallel to the artist's visual language (which, according to the recollections of colleagues, often served as a constant background in his studio). In the artist's practice, there are also broader philosophical references, in particular, the idea of cultural decline after Auschwitz (after Theodor Adorno), reflecting a definitive reappraisal of the understanding of human nature in the second half of the twentieth century. In one of his interviews (for details, see https://varianty.lviv.ua/publikatsiyi/myroslav-yahoda-ya-stvoryv-svii-svit-i-ya-shchaslyvyi), the artist noted that for years he had practically not left his basement studio and did not even visit the centre of Lviv. This was a conscious choice of seclusion as a condition for creativity, and he named the source of his images as rather the magic, mysticism and energy of Lviv itself, but of that "old" one which, according to the artist, no longer exists (2014). As researchers note: "Often the constructs proposed by the artist in verbal and visual forms so clearly allow one to read the intonations of delirium that it is practically impossible to distance oneself from this impression. However, to reduce everything to the latter would be not only fragmentary but also completely irresponsible. As of today, opinion has the opportunity to fluctuate from acceptance to denial, from recognition to sharp criticism, but what it really is can only be said from a certain distance. The fact is that Myroslav Yahoda lived and worked at a specific time in a specific place; his personal choice became the basis for the specificity of a practice that is rather a phenomenon from the realm of cultural anthropology, and not just creativity. Myroslav Yahoda became the simultaneous director, screenwriter, set designer and main actor of his life, after all, just like any other individual integrated into social life" (for details, see http://www.ji.lviv.ua/n89texts/horunzha-dystanciya-nul.htm).

Object description

In terms of its formal and symbolic connotations, the work corresponds to the mature period of the artist's oeuvre. Against the background of an intense, almost ultramarine blue colour that fills the entire canvas without any reference to depth or a horizon, emerges the elongated, slightly deformed figure of a nude woman – Saint Veronica. Her face is pale, greenish-ochre, with large, sad eyes and expressive lips, surrounded by a golden-orange aureole that transitions into strands of wavy, reddish-blonde hair. The artist interprets the body not anatomically, but as an almost boneless form: the arms and shoulders flow into one another with broad, soft brushstrokes in shades of turquoise, green and ochre.
The most remarkable element of the composition is a second, smaller face, simply integrated into Veronica's silhouette at the level of the chest and abdomen – pale, almost mask-like, forming a single whole with the plane of her body. It is distinguished by grotesquely schematic white circles of the eyes, in the centre of which dark dots of pupils are placed. This double imagery – a face above a face – can be interpreted as a direct continuation of the theme inherent to the concept of an imprint, a trace, an image that arises not through the act of painting, but through contact, pressure and touch.
Veronica's body becomes yet another "shroud", another surface capable of accommodating someone's face. Below, at the hip level, the figure holds a large white cloth, visually merging with it as if the figure itself grows out of this canvas. The cloth depicts the face of Jesus Christ: a beard, dishevelled hair, traces of blood above the forehead and the frozen gaze of light blue eyes. This part is composed in such a way that the cloth occupies almost a third of the lower half of the painting, dominating the figure of the woman herself. The artist deliberately shifts the focus of the composition from Veronica as a figure to the artefact – the relic she holds.
Iconographically, Myroslav Yahoda's work is based on an established medieval subject which, according to the apocryphal tradition of the sixth Station of the Cross, was imprinted on the cloth with which Veronica wiped the face of Jesus Christ on the way to Golgotha. The classical tradition (from Byzantine and Romanesque Mandylions to interpretations by El Greco and later Symbolists) usually depicts either the face in isolation, somewhat outside the narrative context, or the figure of Veronica with the cloth spread before her. It is this latter, "presentational" scheme that the artist chose. However, Myroslav Yahoda challenges the canonical hierarchy: the relic-cloth almost merges with the woman's body, falling in a heavy, corporeal mass, while the colour of the face on the veil (greenish-pale, with distinct blood stains) echoes the general greenish-ochre hue of Veronica's skin – the boundary between her and the image she holds is blurred.
In the broader context of the artist's oeuvre, with his constant interest in depersonalisation, liminal states and the sacred as a form of liminal experience, "Veil of Veronica" is a reflection not so much on the idea of the Acheiropoieton (an image not made by human hands) as on the very mechanics of reflection. The faces here multiply (the face of Jesus Christ on the cloth, another face on the woman's body, Veronica's own face), creating a chain of trace-images, each subsequent one being a reflection of the previous, so the very idea of a single, coherent personality dissolves in this sequence of touches and mirrorings.

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Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Veil of Veronica

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