| MICHAL
SAGAR
Michal Sagar’s paintings and drawings
show naked babies floating in space, seemingly in a state of
bliss. Like Adam and Eve before their apple-eating fiasco, they
don’t seem to know that they’re naked and therefore
have no shame. Exulting in their little bodies, the figures
of As Above So Below tumble like astronauts, space-walking
into new psychic territory.
Sagar often pairs females and male babies, as in Lifeline,
Space Between and Partners. This pairing in
not sexual, but rather an expression of wholeness and recognition
that the psyche embraces both female and male characteristics.
The female/male duality is one of the strongest in Western civilization
and, while the times they are a-changing, we are still uncomfortable
with strong women and sensitive men. Sagar presents these seeming
opposites as a unity. It’s telling that, in researching
the images of babies made during the Renaissance for this series,
Sagar could not find any females.
We also see the healing of another duality: the famous mind/body
split. We love images of babies, yet Sagar’s are unsentimental
and self-possessed. What Sagar renders here is the intelligent
joy of the body, the “unencumbered fearlessness”
before our socialization. Psychologist Carol Gilligan reminds
us in The Birth of Pleasure that “emotions –
felt in the body – facilitate and enhance rather than
compromise intelligence and thought” (p. 6).
While
the babies are oblivious to society’s need for decorum,
they often seem unaware of each other. Still, in Interchange,
there is contact, where the figure on the right tentatively
reaches out his arm and touches the other. A connection is made
and perhaps these female and male sides can communicate after
all. Contact shows this touch as an inner movement.
The babies’ eyes are closed, suggesting inner sight, and
the arm, and therefore the touch, seems to come from within
each figure.
Babies
are also the concrete manifestation of our fertility, but Sagar
sees them as metaphors of creativity. The message of this work,
according to Sagar, “is not to go out and literally make
babies, but to enter the creative process with a sense of fullness.”
Insight, in which the figure meets our gaze while two pairs
of hands flower from her torso, expresses this psychic moment
of creative blossoming.
NANCY
ROBINSON | KAREN WILCOX | RINA
YOON
Figure
& Psyche Homepage
|
As
Above So Below, 2004, oil on linen
Partners, 1997, conte on paper
Interchange, 2004, oil on linen
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