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Man and God

Myroslav Yahoda

Basic information

ID: Ж-7819
Author: Myroslav Yahoda
Name: Man and God
Date of creation: 1997
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

Unlike other works from the same series held in the Gallery's collection – namely "Religious Figures", "Island of Fish" and "Veil of Veronica" – the canvas "Man and God" is dated 1997 (a year earlier than the aforementioned works). It constructs a direct, almost frontal confrontation between two images, rather than combining them into a single whole.
The composition is divided vertically into two unequal parts. On the left stands a brown pillar or column in the shape of a cross, dotted with tiny, dark brushstrokes. These brushstrokes resemble drops or nails falling from top to bottom in two parallel rows. Embedded within the thickness of this column is the face of Jesus Christ in a crown of thorns. It is almost frozen, with wide-open eyes looking directly at the viewer. This is an "Acheiropoieton" countenance, as if captured directly within the structure of the cross, which makes a direct reference to the motif of Veronica's cloth.
On the right, occupying the larger part of the canvas, emerges the figure of a man in a white shirt with an axe in his hand. This is not a heroic image, but a disturbing, almost terrifying one: wide-open green eyes, a mouth open in a speechless scream or numbness. The blade of the axe is raised to the level of the face of Jesus Christ – this gesture can be interpreted in several ways: as a literal action (a woodcutter chopping the cross), as a theological metaphor for sin, or as a broader image of a man armed against his own sacred source. The axe itself, compositionally placed between the human and divine faces, creates a visual axis that simultaneously divides and connects these two poles stated in the work's title.
In terms of colour, the painting is built on the contrast between warm ochre-brown (the image of Jesus Christ and the cross) and cold blue-turquoise colours (the background, the space around the man with the axe). The very distribution of the palette marks the boundary between the two worlds proclaimed in the work's title: the sphere of the divine, embedded within the motionless, archaic matter of wood, and the sphere of man – moving, anxious, armed. The work logically continues the general line of the 1997–1998 series: the sacred here is treated not as a dogma, but rather as an arena of existential drama; not as an object of contemplation, but as a space of direct, intense confrontation between man and his prime source, where the very possibility of violence (the axe) becomes an inseparable part of this relationship.
At the same time, it is worth mentioning a seminal 1885 text by Ivan Franko: "There is no Lord, no Lord in heaven longer!/ There is no sole autocrat, no creator,/ There is no one who with a word almighty/ Brought all from nothing! Like a shadow vast,/ He lay across the whole world, overshadowing/ For hundreds of thousands of years the minds of men./ He squeezed their hearts with iron pincers/ Of anxiety, tore souls, and gulped down blood,/ And the warm steam of slaughtered flesh/ Snuffed in his greedy nostrils! Like a vampire,/ Upon humanity's chest that phantom crouched/ And sucked away its finest vital juices./ And now he's gone! The sun! The sun! The light!/ He is no more! Freedom! I, a worm,/ I, an unnoticeable atom in nature,/ I killed him, ripped him open, cast him to the winds!/ I, with the arrows of thoughts mighty, clear,/ Pierced him right through and felled him/ To the ground, like David did Goliath./ With the sword of knowledge and human experience/ I severed his head. My victory!/ He is no more, and never was!/ I thrust him into that immense nothingness,/ From which there is no return!".

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Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery

Man and God

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