by Dan Aldo
Israel Tsvaygenbaum’s paintings exhibited recently at Artifact, NYC are within the great artistic tradition of exploring the psyche in order to bring to light what was formally mundane. His interest in the symbolic language is not an overtly anti-empirical, rooted in the Jewish tradition, or an overtly rationalist one. It has the necessary component of inner resistance and contradiction that fuels great art.
The artists’s work emerges out of the need to present first and foremost, the breathing visual incarnation of aesthetic intuition. This involves an intense concentration on the part of the artist to balance conscious and unconscious activity, drawing upon a power-not-itself, and combining the real and the ideal. In effect, what we see in the artist’s efforts is the condition critical to artistic advancement: an opening consciousness.
Tsvaygenbaum has incorporated the various facets of his personality through the growing awareness of a paradigmatic state of internal contradiction, which resides in an authentic creative process. His remarkable scenes of every-day life bear down on two primary impulses. The first is a response that is dramatic at its base to the complexities and psychic entanglements of human beings. At the same time, the artist celebrates the mysteriousness and the web of intricacies that join people together.