Yisrael K. Feldscott @ b. sakata garo - Squarecylinder.com – Art Reviews | Art Museums

Law and Order, 2013, mixed media on paper

Yisrael K. Feldscott’s Neo-Expressionist paintings appeal to our collective conscience. Depicting war from the victims’ perspective, they show tribal and native people under siege, surrounded by symbols that suggest conflicts around the globe: in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. While violence of the sort Feldscott describes is pervasive, its psychological toll can be difficult to gauge, particularly since most of it comes to us through media images.

Feldscott brings these conflicts into sharp focus with a point-blank perspective. His paintings on paper and panel (which carry titles like Soldier with Collateral Damage, Crack in the World, Path of Sorrows, Death Beds, Border Crossings, Law and Order and Burning Monk) are packed with skulls, automatic weapons and cowering figures flanked by repeating decorative patterns, animal forms and other bits of tribal

Fire + Man Wolf, 2013, mixed media on paper

iconography. He weaves them together using confident, impassioned gestures and with tropical colors set against dark grounds. They are haunting, electrically charged and utterly convincing. So much so that you may wonder if the artist witnessed the events he depicts. While nothing I’ve read confirms this, other parts of his biography suggest that possibility while also pointing to alternate ways of seeing and knowing.

The first was growing up in Chicago. There, Feldscott absorbed the influences of Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum and Leon Golub and other so-called “Imagists” who refashioned the darker impulses of Surrealism and Dadaism into a grotesquerie that, for a spell, became the city’s trademark. He then moved to San Francisco, where in 1974 he became, at age 21, the youngest artist to exhibit at SFMOMA. The work was a scruffy, scratchy, graffiti-like mix of feral beasts and shot-through figures overlaid with stenciled

text. It placed him slightly ahead of the wave of Neo-Expressionism that would later sweep New York. But instead of riding it, Feldscott dropped out. In the late 1970s he traveled to Mexico, Central America and the Amazon jungle where he studied shamanism before returning to Bolinas where he now lives and works. During his absence he kept painting; but for two decades starting in 1979 he stopped showing. He resurfaced locally in 2008 in a show at the Paul Mahder Gallery that caught the eye of Peter Selz, who, operating under the auspices of a curatorial organization called Rediscovered Masters, became Feldscott’s advocate.

Medico, 2013, mixed media on paper, 45 1/2x 37 1/2"

A survey of the artist’s history, gleaned from exhibition catalogs, shows close affinities to Jean Michel Basquait, Keith Haring, Sue Coe and Raymond Saunders. We also learn from these sources that he is a practitioner “psychotropic therapy,” which, if I recall Carlos Castaneda correctly, entails the ingestion of ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogen that can just as easily shred the mind as open it to startling visions. Which may explain how Feldscott is able to credibly channel the horror of war without actually experiencing it.

Problem is, the visions Feldscott summons seem to be filtered through the sensibilities of artists who preceded him, particularly the German Expressionist A. R. Penck, whose totemic, pictographic forms strongly resemble those seen in Feldscott’s work. Picasso also comes to mind, particularly in the mask-like faces that populate many of Fedscott’s paintings. While he executes them masterfully and with tremendous depth of feeling, it’s hard to see past the references they so obviously call forth — even as they carve a pipeline into the spirit world, tapping what feel like the same impulses that drove humans to draw on cave walls.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Yisrael K. Feldscott: “Path of Sorrows” @ b. sakata garo through May 30, 2015.

Comments

craig n. smith says

May 28, 2015 at 12:54 PM

Ugh, what an awful show.

Full of puerile, pseudo-shamanistic imagery and ”important” commentary about war.

But what’s clearly worst is that the works are dead as a doornail formally. With a couple of notable exceptions the bulk of the show features figure/ ground relationships that completely fail to congeal. What shows up throughout the gallery is extremely poor drawing of sensational images floating detached from the backgrounds and relying on their horrific nature to carry the work. It is embarrassingly sophomoric posturing, devoid of formal acuity.

I see it all the time in pictures by teenage artists trying to be meaningful and deep. This guy is 60-something years old? And actually purports to have some spiritual awareness and empathy for the world induced by the ingestion of psychedelics? Does the artist also have swampland for sale?

The images do not appear to be atavistic, they are contrived. They are completely incapable of “credibly” channeling anything. They claim importance but fall terribly short of creating a visual experience that amounts to anything more than self-importance.

The couple or three works that actually do have some unity seem to be channeling Abraham Rattner.

But the reference to A.R. Penck is an apt one…. an artist who became rich and famous by making paintings with poor figure/ field relationships.

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