Evan Bellin's paintings are a fight against Imaginary semblance, against the limits that we set for ourselves in understanding and perceiving the world and others. His paintings are uncompromising, non-forgiving, and allow no respite.
His work is a powerful mirror of suffering bodies and beings. The scenes reflect representative psychiatric disordered behaviors such as those related to eating disorders, scenes from horror movies, particularly those of Alfred Hitchcock, reinterpretations of photographic archival conflicts, like the executions committed during World War II and other awful scenes from the history of humanity.
From movies to memories, he merges fiction with reality, thereby tracing the interweaving trails of substance and subject.
It is indeed the third person relationship to the “reality” of events and to the subjective behavior of the “Other” that the painter challenges with his own perception and artistic expression. What he interrogates as "the Real", a concept in psychology and philosophy, is occluded by the subjectivity of perception, that eventually constitutes the multiple paradoxes of repressed memory. Yet his representations of the various specific situations, reveal a certain universality in those experiences from History and from distinctly singular situations, pathological or otherwise.
Evan Bellin is also a psychiatrist - psychoanalyst. Even though as an artist he must have been influenced by the pathologies he treats, he insists that his paintings are various expressions derived from his spontaneous associations and parapraxes of mind. None of the situations he portrays are calculated or thought out in advance. He paints without any consideration of the images or the powerful impact they might eventually have on their viewer.
His paintings are totally expressive. Though the faces are depersonalized and indistinct and disordered, and sometimes even hidden, they have the power to decode fear, sadness, confusion and "madness".
Passing through his own filters, Evan transposes those powerful emotions in an astonishing and very personal way.
To explain some of the characteristics of his paintings, he makes an analogy to his psychoanalytic profession and his therapeutic stance toward his patients. He often sits behind them as they lay on the couch, eliminating face to face interference. This method helps both the patient and he maximize their Unconscious communications, by reducing Imaginary defenses against these communications by means of the exchange of predictable interpersonal facial signals. Both he and his patient thus stand a better chance of encountering the Real that will be addressing them from yet a third unpredictable and uncanny place.
According to the artist, to locate the Real on his canvas, he exaggerates the lines, deforms the figures, avoids conventional and Imaginary notions of the beautiful, feasts in the asymmetries and peculiar distortions of the body and face, avoids resemblances and thereby achieves greater clarity of subject.
This allows him to re-frame himself in a new and personal world, disconnected from the daily images that otherwise inundate us and which limit our imagination and resourcefulness, leading us to entrapment within the “delusions of everyday life.”
This exhibition PSYCHE intends to question our perception of the Other, of normality and of the malady. Evan’s work questions standard limits of “normality” that are by definition subjectively defined by idiosyncratic notions of particular societies and times and by what is taken to be familiar and friendly.
Margalit Berriet et Marie-Cécile Berdaguer
curators of the exhibition
with Doron Polak director of the Artist Museum at Givataim - Israël
EVAN BELLIN
08.10-04.11.2016
PSYCHE
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