"An Art That Provokes"
Text by Francesca Biagi-Chai, psychoanalyst, 2012
Reading note
Written in 2012, the text by Francesca Biagi-Chai offers a psychoanalytic reading of Abraham Aronovitch’s work, attentive to the connections between creation, desire, and language. It questions the capacity of art to generate an experience that resists immediate interpretation, and to bring forth a space in which figure, matter, and meaning are bound together in an irreducible tension.
Drawing on concepts of jouissance, transgression, and lalangue, the text emphasizes the deeply embodied dimension of the artistic act. The artwork is conceived as a site of passage, where the object detaches itself from the artist to become shared experience, engaging the viewer in a perception that precedes any intellectual elaboration.
This text sheds light on a period in which Abraham Aronovitch’s practice explores the figure as a locus of tension between matter, gaze, and presence. It reveals an early attention to incompleteness and encounter, anticipating the existential and relational concerns that will later unfold in series such as Behind The Obvious.
Critical text
“The rose is without why,” says the poet.
Art is like the rose: to seek to understand it is to destroy it. This does not mean, however, that it cannot be commented upon. To speak of it is to enter into a metonymic movement that presses ever closer to the object, shaping itself around it without ever capturing it — for it is the artwork that captures us.
In this sense, art belongs to a new language: the language of the artist, which conveys what ordinary language, however refined, fails to produce. Lalangue, as Lacan writes it as a single word in order to restore its concrete dimension and include its effects, is both a void — since the word, in its abstraction, is the murder of the thing, confronting human beings with the anticipation of their mortal destiny, a source of unease, anxiety, and vertigo — and at the same time, a response.
Art is one such response, offered by one person — the artist — yet resonating with many. Not as a law to which one submits, but as the sharing of a jouissance that touches us and, before satisfying the intellect, satisfies a drive in an unprecedented, striking way. Art is satisfaction, akin to sexual satisfaction: one cannot say precisely what it satisfies. It goes beyond the artwork itself; it carries something of us away.
Lacan thus formulates, with regard to art, what Freud consistently upheld: one must never psychoanalyse works of art, only artists. From art, we are to take something away — a seed launched, thrown, catapulted into the world by the artist, who teaches us, fundamentally, about detachment from what has been created.
At what moment does the artist consider the work complete? When does this object detach from itself to become part of everyone, an added value with an irreducible subversive power? For art is transgression, and for this reason it is inevitably anchored in culture and in its time. It cannot be separated from it, for it constitutes what Lacan calls “that which moves in the depths of taste.” This is to say that the artist has something to say — or more precisely, following the logic of creation, something to make the other say, to bring forth, to provoke in the strongest sense of the word. This is why, in painting, everything acts together: composition, image, and the title given by the artist become one.
This pursuit of unity is particularly evident in the works of Abraham Aronovitch, who seems to have entered art through a sudden flash — a moment of clarity and intensity that produced a reversal, allowing desire to be rediscovered along the Möbius strip, without crossing an edge, but by pursuing a part of oneself. One might then ask: for you, an ophthalmologist turned painter, what does the eye represent — between vision and gaze, drive and its translation? What is striking in his works is the way every fragment of material is included in the artwork, as if it were self-evident — a remarkable reclaiming of what was once mere support, becoming remainder.
When asked about his perspective, Aronovitch responds: “the interconnection of humanity with the universe — the harmonious and the catastrophic.” The strength of his work lies in the continuity between material, image, and idea, rendering his art consubstantial with what it seeks to signify in the Other.
Beginning from a painting
Let us begin with a single work — not an exhaustive list, but what genuinely provoked me, in the literal sense, and compelled me to write.
“The World Today” is the simple title of a painted-sculpted work (would he accept this term?). From the outset, the threads of human lives intertwine — colors of humanity, certainly, but also colors of the earth: the soil in which roots are planted. From the front and the back of the work, everything is present. Flower, plant, future — and at the same time, the blood of martyred peoples.
The construction abolishes time, and the present asserts itself with an intensified presence that concerns us directly. Embedded within this ensemble is a tied white square — a small gift for humanity — inviting us to recover the value of mystery. Whether good or bad matters little, so long as it remains there, like a thorn in the foot, reminding us that the human condition is, above all, one of incompleteness.
One might smile and call this an ode to castration — that which drives creation — or an illustration of Lacan’s statement: “Total jouissance is forbidden to the speaking being as such.” It thus falls to us to invent the common object that attempts to recover it.
The Eye
The eye lies at the center of the "Self-Portrait". Are we surprised? The weight of words traverses the history of the subject; the eye was already inscribed in the artist’s destiny. He is this eye — and once again shows us how singular our being is, yet also how double and punctiform it remains: image and depth, choice.
Each viewer, confronted with it, may ask not “Who am I?” but rather “Which part of myself am I?” — a question that reaches far beyond surface identity.
It is impossible not to evoke here the work "Black Hole, Shoah", in which Abraham Aronovitch reminds us that humanity has been shaken by a black hole — not only in the astrophysical sense, which absorbs past and present, but also as a historical abyss from which the future must continue to extricate itself.
A funnel-shaped form, black and punctuated with blood-red — vampirism elevated to the level of a state. At its base, tightly bound black threads intertwine like columns of disoriented men led to their deaths: trains, rail switches, radio waves invading homes, the intimate spaces penetrated by the ominous voice of the planner. Red threads appear — blood, certainly, but also warmth, the circulation of life persisting to the very limits of the possible.
Then comes a halt. For within this painting lies a mise en abyme of black holes that intensifies its horror: the thread stops, everything could end there — but it does not. White threads, upon which history has yet to be written, emerge from the void. A strange phenomenon, except in a work of art: they rise into the air like a new flame — the flame of love and desire, never extinguished.
One then recalls the poet and resistance fighter René Char, who wrote these lines before committing himself against the worst: “At this hour, our earth would be nothing more than the sphere of an immense cry lodged in the throat of a torn infinity. This is possible — and it is impossible.”
I would like to conclude with what Abraham Aronovitch refers to as his sculpture "Love", paired with its counterpart "Art".
Impeccable sculpted letters, red, glossy, without roughness, spell the word Love. Imperfection, as one might expect — since the artist’s work never seeks its eradication but rather its necessary inclusion as the unknown factor of humanity, its body, its limp — lies elsewhere. It resides in their deliberately skewed alignment, as I would put it.
See also:
— Chris Cyrille, art critic, "How to figure your face?"
— Leïla Simon, art critic, "The Blue Hour"