Fate is a concept that one cannot do without when characterizing the art of Michael Hazin. The artist thematizes this concept without foisting or pedaling the drama of the quest for national identity. The polystylism of his works is organic, coming from poetic optics corrected by fate.
Michael Hazin received an excellent schooling — both in the sense of a broad professional and cultural outlook and in the sense of the academic skills of constructing form and the "madeness" of the work as an object. Hazin is fully armed with something only rarely encountered in modern art — academic mastery.
The result was a long-running theme of anthropomorphic-hieroglyphic images, bent from hollow pipes, running through a large group of Hazin’s works. This theme has several planes — metaphorical, historical-cultural, purely plastic and even thematic and narrative.
"Madeness" or objectivity is a typical part of the painterly component of this series. New issues appear in works by Michael Hazin that might seem to be traditionally figurative or narrative. For example, the Jewish Musicians (Klazmers) and All The World is a Circus series. The most important aspect of these series is not the life material, interesting per se and expressively "captured". Neither is it the subject drama, historical-cultural associations or appeal to cultural memory. Everything done by Hazin is ultimately directed on bringing out perception and contemplation as an event.
Chronologically, Hazin’s last large-scale series is a body of twelve works, made within the bounds of the Jewish Still-Life project, created in collaboration with photographer Boris Belenkin. This project represents a contest of two systems of visualization — the traditional-painterly and the photographic. Both artists work on still-lifes of identical objective and symbolical content. The still-life is generally complex in composition — wholly in the spirit of the Dutch masterpieces of the seventeenth century or Chardin’s set-ups.
In the contest with photography Hazin has mobilized all the possibilities of poetic optics and made its multi-layeredness corrected by the artist’s fate viewer-friendly.
Alexander Borovsky. The Oeuvre of Michael Hazin.
Boris Belenkin’s biography
Michael Hazin’s biography |
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