Yeroham Ashagre

"The gift of poetry - it's to speak simply, gently, to name things and concepts. We keep on forgetting
about this and it seems to us that all has been already said. " - Anna Kamienska

I, somewhat cynically but I hope only provisionally so, say 'no' to cynicism, and don't feel apologetic for
holding that view. I see the world losing its soul, and ever increasingly getting mechanized, and hear its
advocates, with all their moralizing sophistries, trying to convince everyone the only attitude one should
have towards the world is that of troubleshooting. This view metastasizing in the contemporary art
world, I'm told artists today have a responsibility to 'get out of their ivory towers' and help society 'fix'
its ailments, or at least position themselves in the 'now' to preach about the end of art. All talk about
love, nature, or 'humaneness' is sneered at as romantic atavism at best, or as fascistic essentialism at
worst, obsolete in either case.

"How to fall in love again?" - The only question worth asking seems to be just this. For the question
already assumes all the injuries, traumas, disillusionments, and subsequent indifference suffered from a
previous love; but that doesn't negate the reality or necessity of love itself. But who can define this
divinely elusive affect; and who can draw it out with a fishhook? I see beauty, even if only fleetingly, in
the forms of shedding leaves, in the movements of clouds, and in the undulations of the human body. I
don't find it merely interesting to look at (in fact, I believe interestingness is a counterfeit of beauty); I
see infinite veils of transparency layering on top of one another to yield an opacity of appearance. I feel
it my task to try, using the devices that I have, to penetrate just one more layer and make the
appearance just a wee bit more transparent. As quaint as I may sound, I believe this has been the sole
task of artists of all places and of all ages - a view that is ridiculed these days. But I feel it irreverent to
invent forms in order to please, as I feel it irreverent to subject form to an invented concept in order to
preach - formalism and conceptualism - both of which, I see as traps.

I make art because I want to love the world for all its faults and cruelties. Yes, it's not easy to do so. It's
much easier to try to fix it - since the latter assumes the world is simply a big complicated machine that
can be optimized for living. But I wonder why this optimum feels so dreary!

Practically speaking, I want to make a human figure with the poignancy of life. I want to make it fresh. I
want to make it specific. I long to just name it 'man' and it becoming so. And I don't want to do a
hackneyed revision of art history. I want to invent the wheel afresh. I want to fashion a golem with
simplicity, candour, precision and perfection to the point of rendering myself superfluous. (Who cares
about me anyway!) How to do so? The only answer I can give is to practice. I keep in view the horizon
I'm striving for while rowing the boat consistently and perhaps monotonously. My next piece is thus only
a next step from my last one. I'm not an imaginative person always bubbling with new ideas; I've but
given up on finding them. I'd rather work in the hope of someday an idea finding me. All I can do is to
stay prepared until that day arrives.
My second-year show exemplifies my primary preoccupation with the human body. In that show, I have
attempted to fashion archetypal standing figures that ended up looking ancient and thus anachronistic.
In reality, I had only my own experiences to draw from – my vision, my prior artistic training rooted in
the human figure, my exposures in art and life, and the materiality of clay that imposes physical
constraints on the possibilities of building large scaled sculptures, and not least of all, my longing to
overcome all of the above. Overcoming!

All that being said however, I can’t deny that my sculptures have art historical resonances; and those
resonances are with modernism as opposed to postmodernism. The closest I could get to contemporary
influences is with the London School painters: Francis Bacon, Euan Uglow, Lucian Freud, and Frank
Auerbach, who only recently passed away. The notions of a sensuous preoccupation with reality,
moulding chaotic matter into a form, not taking anything for granted, disregarding preconceptions of
form, and always starting from the scratch, speak to what I do in my studio. The art historian Thomas
McEvilley asserts in his book Sculpture in the Age of Doubt that the art of postmodernism is an art of
doubt, in contrast to the art of modernism being an art of certainty; which I do not agree with. Just walk
into a contemporary gallery and read the clear cut, ideological, and programmed statements and their
comfortable derivative art works. I would, in contrast, agree with T.J. Clark, who asserts in his lecture
The Painting of Postmodern Life?, “Modernism was testing, as I said before. It was a kind of internal
exile, a retreat into the territory of form, but form was ultimately a crucible, an act of aggression, an
abyss into which all the comfortable “givens” of the culture were sucked and then spat out.” He further
on argues that the art of postmodernism, as modernism did, should ‘put to test in form’ the givens of
the age – the belief structures, which he identifies as virtuality and visuality.

The virtual has long become our primary dwelling. The spatio-temporal world has lost its authority. We
have lost touch with the Real, however hackneyed that phrase has by now become. My work, in that
sense only, is a response to a contemporary and postmodern reality, inasmuch as I posit sensuous,
hand-wrought, and spatial entities that strike with their otherness. Their apparent anachronism serves
all the more to incant the song of the Earth, as the biblical Adam was incanted to being out of the Earth,
in opposition to the songs of the virtual. I want to fall in love again with matter. No ideology! I want to
sing the song of life, and I also want to sing the song of death.

Where is the name?

The heavens that breathed it

And made it so?

Where is the where?

Where is the when?

Where is the why?

Where is the how?

Just to pass the time,

What then...

To do with the pages of the book

You never read,

The passages of the page,

The words,

The images,

You forgot?

The holes you didn't fill,

The love you never loved,

You banter, you blunder, you stutter,

You mutter, you murmur,

If the perfume has color,

If the lamp has danger,

If the leaves you crashed under your feet had luster, for there is never

A way of knowing the other.

What then of art?

What then of death?