MARK KANOVICH

Lev Yakovlev

Painters. Mark Kanovich and Children

Where are they looking? Why are not they smiling? How do they behave towards each other? Or rather, do they display any interest towards each other at all? What is their attitude toward the world? The questions are interesting and thought –provoking. And even though I am pretty certain that the answers I might come up with would make Mark Kanovich (a painter who lives in Rishon-le-Zion that is a half-hour ride from Tel-Aviv) laugh, I would still like to try to answer them.

I presume that all the people and objects depicted in these pictures are unreal. And although they must have emerged from the artist’s Georgian childhood, these men, women, children, fish, birds, animals and toys, are fruits of his imagination. The painter does not seem to care much about how they look. What really matters to him is how he sees himself and where he stands at the moment when he is painting or sculpting them (these picturesque reliefs).

Have all these people and objects been consciously combined in order to communicate a message? It seems much more likely that these images have just come together to form the following compositions: father-mother-child- pony- bird; boy – toy ship- sea-sand; girl-balloon-grass-pennon. And then, none of these people is either looking at us, or at each other; they are mostly gazing at the sky. They are self-absorbed like autistic children. The artist’s children are not of this world, or rather, they do not belong in this world. They belong in the painter’s world. This is a theater of one director who is pulling the strings and juggling several roles - he is at the same time the writer, scenographer, choreographer, and the only performer.        

What is that? The boy and the girl on the wagon –boat are attempting to smile? But if you take a closer look they seem on the verge of tears. The wagon has a helm and a mast, but the mast is broken, and there is only one wheel so that this ‘vehicle’ and its passengers are not going or sailing anywhere. They are not going to fly anywhere either, though they would care to do it. Even when the artist’s children are walking or running, they are in fact standing motionless.

The painter would gladly have depicted how they are going or flying somewhere but he knows only too well that nothing of the kind will befall them. However, he is not wringing his hands over that in anguish.

Could the reason why the children are not smiling be that the poor souls have been forced to display all these pennons, wagon-boats, mandolins, trumpets, drums, swords, balls, paper airplanes and masks? Apparently, while children were playing, there appeared Marc Kanovich and said: well, then, it is me who has invented you, and now I am going to paint you. So there they froze on the spot obediently, solemnly, quite in a grown-up way. They could not help but obey the master. After all, he is a respected person and a famous painter. But the point is that the painter himself is not serious and he laughs at their seriousness. Moreover, he longs to be with them there, to return to the lost realm of the childhood that he had invented, to the childhood which is melting away into haze.

These pictures are beautiful. They are beautiful in a way that evokes feelings of delicate tenderness and affection. Look at them and you are going to wonder about how graceful they all are, - all these people, animals, birds and fish, despite their size. And they are certainly amusing; but that is not a gimmick or a maneuver of the artist. The point is that Marc Kanovich is simply a jolly, cheerful man.

For all that, you can’t help wondering why these children have such unsmiling faces. After all, is not it fun to ride a horse, hold a pennon in your hand, or be on the ship with a clown? And so forth. And what is there that children know that makes them look the way they do in these pictures? And what is there that the painter knows about them? These paintings grip the viewer. You can contemplate them for a long time and reflect on them. Surprisingly, there are no recurring themes in the artist’s paintings. This is especially noticeable in the graphic works of the painter (see a book of graphic works –‘My Jewish sentiments’, loose translation). Though the album contains more than three hundred drawings, each of them tells its own story.

The children of Marc Kanovich look like adults. The artist does not go for good –looking children, and actually, he does not think much about childhood. His children have awkward figures; they are neither pretty nor elegant. And this is only honest. We did not use to admire ourselves when we were small children. We used to be admired by the others who knew nothing about what was going on inside us. But we suffered, and suffered deeply. It used to be like that, and it was all very serious.