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PORTRAIT OF ELLIOT ELGART made by his friend SAM AMATO

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There is only one house between my house and Charlene’s, the wife widowed by the painter in 2014. She was about to sell Elliot’s studio and invited me to go with her and see her husband’s paintings before they were moved out. 

An artist’s studio is a breathing space. The street and the building, with other studios one after the other, give the shoulders to urban life and face a wild garden. The place is silent, almost secret. I looked at Elliot Elgart’s art for the very first time; time disappeared. And a clear dialogue started between the images placed on canvas by his pupils and hands and my body visiting the painted world he had transformed, drawing and coloring a ‘biomorphic’ reality. Forms of the living can’t be prisoner of geometry nor reproduce the photographic blockage of only one instant.  If one calls them ‘abstractions’ images start competing with realism, as if imaginary compositions had been cut out forever from things as we see them. 

I don’t want to lock his art in any inappropriate cage. Art is a text escaping words; it’s itself a description, a mixture of perception, memory, feelings incessantly changed by passing time.  Adam Phillips wrote that our relationship to change might “convert us to the beauty of the ephemera”. That’s what I saw in Elgart’s paintings.  For the same reason I’m placing in this blog images of his work taken in his empty studio, “echoing and complementing each other in a context of spatial ambiguity”. Elgart’s words. Spatial ambiguity is inside most of his works. 

Look at images as they live

Look at images as they live

Then, listen.

The true human dialogue, the one

of the hands, of the pupils,

is a silent dialogue.

Water melts me from words.

….

I talk of time out of time

I talk for yesterday and today;

about yesterday that is a lesson of life

about today that is a lesson of death.      

   Edmond Jabès, Le livre des questions

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Images, words, neither are more solid than figments.   It’s not the blue chair that is described, or a false facsimile. 

“It is an artificial thing that exist,

In its own seeming, plainly visible, 

Yet not too closely the double of our lives,

Intenser than any actual life could be…”   Wallace Stevens, Description without place  

In a room, in which objects and walls resist any reasonable position, the painted volumes  become a small theater of displacements: angles are free from traditional perspective, walls become volumes rather than surfaces, and forms meet as colors want. Vase and flowers should fall from the table’s odd inclination but they don’t, and the chair can be seen as a surreal creature with two different seats; the white clothe is perched on both, is it a bird? Admirable complexity of an unusual painting. I couldn’t call it a still life. 

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Pink moon. The name I would give to a nocturnal combination of cut out parts. Abstraction? No. Maybe a collage of memories, to become a witty entity far from being satisfactory, familiar. And yet, it engages the viewer in a warm, friendly way, even funny, with the tiny figurine sitting on flatness and a pink animal neck resting on the line between white and green. It is a light, enchanting, capture of different forms without forcing them. Please, be together. Elgart seems to say. 

In the morning I happened to have a humming bird flying in front of me within a hand’s breadth.  Her flight was combining  short movements in the air, vertical and horizontal, an irregular syntax of segments. This painting as I see it is the humming bird’s flight made tangible, and gentle. 

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Floating landscape.  It seems to me a good example of the beauty of the ephemera. A combination of four horizontal landscapes? Lightness. Colors and lines do not hurt one another. They coexist in a floating movement of crossing flatness and depth; marks of human building are ghostlike, as if they had already been canceled by time. Only the foreground shows a certain depth, it could be the present, the rest is just feelings. It’s a landscape inside out, revealing a past that is not anymore.

Unfolding here a small part of his artworks, I bring back Elliot Elgart, a painter who left for the sky in 2014, and has been largely obliterated by the short span of attention that is typical of our time. So many artists had the same destiny. Inevitably, I would say. Elgart taught at UCLA for thirty two years, just before the flooding wave of conceptual art in which so many of us have been involved with passion and enthusiasm. During the short time I spent teaching at UCLA in the New Genre department, invited by Allan Ruppersberg and Paul McCarthy, I didn’t have any idea that completely different, interesting artists, had met the students in the same rooms. 

After his retirement in 1991, a student sent to Elliot a painted card with a special thanks: “You are a true artist! ” – he wrote –  “By this I mean you are passionate, open, and approach this world with a sense of wonder.” 

Today, my sense of wonder helps me to keep my attachment to conceptual art, and to be open to so many different artworks hard to define in verbal frames. One by one, they can be a treasure trove. 

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Because I never met Elliot in person, I hope to keep a glimpse of his spirit reproducing a page he copied by hand and cherished. It is a text by Katsushika Hokusai, 1760 -1849, “the old man mad about drawing”. 

From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the form of things. By the time I was fifty I had published an infinity of designs; but all I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty. I shall have made more progress, at  ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things, at a hundred shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it but a dot or a line, will be alive.

Written at the age of seventy five by me, once Hokusai, today Iwakio Rojin, the old man mad about drawing.

Very likely, Elliot felt in the same shoes as Hokusai. His entire life was dedicated to practice and teaching drawing and painting, following a special twist in his mind, hard to reveal in a verbal form. As I write my idea of his struggle for a personal, unique manner of painting, I stumble into the the dryness of words: as an artist, he was in search of the way to give life to the inside and outside of the the painted bodies. Trying to make the images capable to breathe, and produce energy.  A simple drawing can be alive. His portrait of Chaz Garabedian is lively, as spare and essential as Giacometti’s portraits, with all the figurative details erased until the inner head survives, no different than anyone else. And, as beautiful. 

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When Elliot Elgart reached the marvelous age in which he could penetrate the mystery of things, his body was attacked by cancer. For him, a new country to explore: that hidden, inner body of his, only indirectly visible in medical abstractions. His paintings, for years, became an imaginary walk questioning the organs of his solid self, would they want to be fields of flowers? Flowers indeed that he is not allowed to pick up. One boot is enough, it must be blue.

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“In death I disclose myself

I am a flower no one can pick up.

— You can’t breath it,

if you don’t know where it is.

Yet, you do know it exists.

That’s why you look for it.

You will die without finding

because it is your own death.”  

Edmond Jabès, Le livre des questions

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CAPTIONS

1 Elliot Elgart, no title, 1992, acrylic on paper 19 x 24 in

2 Elliot Elgart, no title, no year, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30 in

3 Elliot Elgart, no title, 1992, acrylic on paper, 22 x 30 in

4 Elliot Elgart, no title, no year, acrylic on paper

5 Elliot Elgart, no title, no year, oil on canvas, 40 x 48 in

6 Elliot Elgart, no title, no year, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 in

7 Elliot Elgart, no title, no year, oil on canvas, 40 x 44 in

8 Elliot Elgart, {Self-portrait}, 1998, wash on paper, 22 x 30 in

9 Elliot Elgart, {birds} drawing on paper

10 Elliot Elgart, {profile}, drawing on paper

11 Elliot Elgart, {portrait of Chaz Garabedian} no year, 38 x 40 in

12 Elliot Elgart, no title, 1993 acrylic on canvas, 40 x 44 in

13 Elliot Elgart, no title, 1993, acrylic on canvas, 54 x 58 in

14 Elliot Elgart, no title, no year, drawing on paper, 17 x 14 in

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems, Vintage Books Edition, 1990 Copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens

Edmond Jabès, Le livre des questions, Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1963