Isaac Celnikier is one of the few survivors of the Bialystok ghetto, one of the escapees from Nazi camps, and later from Stalinist oppression and a de-Stalinization whose deceit is now widely recognized. His work bears the searing trace of these experiences; it is their eloquent proof. Yet Celnikier is not merely a witness, not just a witness who, despite his painful personal involvement in what he depicts, would present it only as an external spectacle, adopting an aesthetic and moral point of view.

The American philosopher Arthur Danto recently reminded us that nothing is more inappropriate than using art and aesthetics to create an "imaged" distance from unacceptable realities. In inhumane and atrocious situations, it is not a matter of producing beautiful visions, no matter how edifying and moral they may be. Danto further clarified that "in such circumstances, one must instead ask what to do. For similar reasons, I believe there are things that it would be almost immoral to give an artistic representation, precisely because doing so would distance them, something that, from a moral standpoint, ought not to be done." However, Isaac Celnikier's work does not rest on such an illustrative concept of detachment from its subject—picturesque and pitiful—placing its subject at a distance from an appreciative, objective gaze. Celnikier's work is neither objective nor distanced; it is a vehement presence, an eternal act of remembrance, personal, subjective, and engaged. It is the work of a man who asserts that he was a witness, an actor, a victim of what he shows, and that by showing it, he created his survival and his dignity as a man. At the same time, he calls on all his brothers to embrace their dignity and survival as human beings. This is not mere testimony but an act of remembrance, expressed in the fire of the existence that provokes it. It is the painter's unique way of living the unnameable and the intolerable, and, by representing them, making this representation a creative act—the very practice of his will as a man to remain human in the face of the inhumane.

To create is not to show one's life, but to live it through and by this necessary and irrepressible creation, which simultaneously reveals and transforms what it shows, acts upon it, because the act of representation reshapes both man and the world to the measure of a conscience.

This is true both of the unbearable, whose memory Isaac Celnikier embodies in such images, and of the joy of harmony with other beings and with a nature that feels like his own flesh. Alongside this dramatic, moving, and essential facet of his work devoted to the martyrology of the Jewish people, Isaac Celnikier's painting is also, and equally essentially, composed of a collection of vibrant, carnal portraits and a significant number of landscapes. In these, the most spontaneous and sophisticated expressions of an enthusiastic connection to the earth are inscribed.

If Isaac Celnikier's commitment to painting was fundamentally conditioned by his existence in the ghettos, camps, genocide, and despair, it was equally shaped by his early awareness that his way of being human was through being a painter—a creator of images and representations—no matter what might happen to him in life. This was coupled with his deeply cultivated and profound respect for the specific demands of the artistic tradition to which he dedicated his life.

Speaking of his artistic training, which in fact began when he took refuge in the Bialystok ghetto at the age of sixteen—where he encountered numerous painters—much has been emphasized about the instruction he received in Prague from 1946 to 1952 under Emil Filla. Filla, along with Prohaska and Kubista, was the leader of the Czech Cubist school and the driving force behind the Manes group during the interwar period. While this education was undoubtedly significant, and the demand for a strict and assertive construction of the pictorial plane is indeed a hallmark of Celnikier’s art, it would be limiting to attribute the foundations of his painting solely to this experience.

Primarily because Celnikier’s commitment to painting was never, and could never have been, purely formal or stylistic. Given all he had already endured, he demanded that his art be active and meaningful—a weapon of critique and a critique wielded through the tools of embodied memory, forever ingrained. While Celnikier, as a painter, could not remain indifferent to Cubism, to the classical works of Braque and Picasso, or to the planar partitioning of color and light in Cézanne’s work, he was particularly drawn to the expressive and expressionist tendencies, as well as the materialist aspirations, of a much older pictorial tradition and of numerous currents in Central and Eastern European painting during the first half of the 20th century.

Celnikier himself, while acknowledging the role of Cubism in his training, emphasized the more personal connections he saw between his work and that of Goya and Soutine. In 1976, Haïm Gamzu recalled the artist’s own words, where he stated that while he shared an expressive language with Picasso, Giacometti, Nicolas de Staël, and Germaine Richier, he felt a deeper affinity for El Greco, Rembrandt, and Goya. These references, explicitly acknowledged by Celnikier, point to works where the rigor of composition underpins and amplifies an intense expressiveness. This is especially evident in the way the turbulent, corporeal energy of the material—color itself—becomes a body and a script imbued with meaning, organized within the ferment of its own manipulated substance.

The earliest canvases exhibited here, painted in Poland during the 1950s, clearly reflect this demand for a near-geometric organization of the pictorial plane. At the same time, even if their materiality and brushwork remain restrained and discreet, they reveal an aspiration to evoke figures, bodies, and forms through the light inherent in their materiality. The large nudes, synthesized and broadly delineated across the canvas, are outlined against a background with tonal saturations and values identical to those of the bodies themselves. This background, rather than functioning as a mere backdrop, becomes a substance and plane of emergence—a medium in which the bodies are inscribed, impressed, and integrated.

The deeply moving sketch of The Ghetto, a study for the large composition now housed at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem (Museum of the Martyrology), may recall, in its rhythmic construction and spatial light, certain postwar works by Picasso. However, it is primarily distinguished by its subtle, dialectical treatment of materials, which serve as equivalents for the light emanating from the bodies. This light becomes the medium and substance of their emergence, creating a powerful interplay between the material and the luminous presence of the figures.

From the very beginning, Celnikier’s materialism was not a formal, theoretical, or dogmatic technique bound to a stylistic conception or an absolute doctrine of the pure materiality of the canvas—reduced to being merely a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order, as Maurice Denis famously described, independent of meaning or expression. Instead, it asserted itself as form and body of representation, as the essence of creating an active depiction of the relationship with the world and with life—a life that could consist of creating this representation, vehemently proclaiming what the world is and what it means to exist in it, standing tall despite everything.

The very substance of the image created of man, expressing his drama, his extermination perpetually overcome through this act of creation, is the substance of all creation. For humanity, to create is precisely to transform material into the image of one’s own representation in and through life. In the works of Soutine, Chagall, and Celnikier, the transgression of the prohibition against representing the human figure transforms the people bound by this prohibition into those most capable of committing this transgression—because they are the people in whom the unspeakable, the unnameable, and the unthinkable of man’s extermination are embodied. Man, the image of God, is mutilated, sacrificed, condemned to death; yet this very representation of his dignity and survival is not blasphemy but rather an eternal act of remembrance. It affirms that man is truly human only when he fights against the blasphemy inflicted upon him—when he, as an image mutilated and sacrificed, perpetually rises anew through his will to recreate himself in the depths of his martyrdom. Man survives in his recreated image, carving a path and existence through the tortures and transformations of matter, his flesh, his blood, his life.

Here, painting becomes a visceral act of being in the world. These works stand as material memory, as a tangible presence that life perpetuates in others even as it is stripped away from us. As Malraux had Picasso say, only the Cycladic idols remind us that those little men of the Cyclades once lived: only the works created by men endure. It is essential that their life in the centuries to come be precisely this living and active memory that perpetuates and renews the consciousness of the dignity of being human, regardless of what is inflicted upon man.

The renowned astrophysicist Hubert Reeves once remarked that it is a joy that humanity exists to be conscious of the extraordinary creation that is the universe, in all its forms—even catastrophic ones. One might think the same applies to the expressive function of representation and active memory that Isaac Celnikier, the Polish-Jewish painter, undertook. His life became this relentless, lucid practice of representing his existence so that all others, in their own ways, might demand the same unyielding lucidity—unyielding in its condemnations, enthusiastic in its marvels, ever-attentive to a world so extraordinary in its turmoil. A world that, even amidst its turmoil, must be lived.

Elisabeth de Fontenay, André Schwartz-Bart, and Pierre Restany have expressed, for all of us, the profound iconographic and pictorial significance of the ceaseless cry embodied in Isaac Celnikier’s large painted and engraved compositions. These works proclaim the visceral testimony of the Holocaust and its martyrology, depicting the unrepresentable precisely because, in such a conception, only art can achieve this unthought, unthinkable, but necessary memory. Yet it is equally vital to feel the same passion and relentless drive to paint that animates Celnikier when he celebrates his hymn to reality and life, driven by an irrepressible need to show that he saw and loved other beings. He saw, loved, and avidly dissected the intricate mineral tangles of Alpine landscapes, the luminous stratifications of barren desert expanses, the dense and damp foliage of mountain forests, and countless impressions of a material and visual world—the very flesh of his life and his enthusiastic will to bear witness to it. To say he was there to see it, and that seeing it was living it, by expressing it in a singular image of his lived tremor.

Celnikier’s portraits and nudes, with their exacerbated expressionist materiality, consistently sing a psychological and physical fervor that echoes his ever-renewed wonder at familiar faces and bodies. Through a violent and spontaneous application of chromatic material with a spatula onto the canvas, using pure tones that sculpt the surface, he continuously reincarnates these figures. The image of the woman, created by a man’s hand, molds itself into the material and emerges as if it were the vera icon of Christ on Veronica’s veil—an indelible and eternal sign of an existence loved, lovingly observed, and lovingly reiterated forever, a memory of the senses. Celnikier’s visceral attachment to capturing the immediacy and authenticity of spiritual and physical emotion through the living figure, molded in rhythm with his gaze, reveals his demand for memory. It establishes him as a painter of the unforgettable—grasped, saved, and perpetuated.

In his landscapes, the familiarity with motifs, inseparably linked to the ever-renewed innocence of his gaze, further exemplifies his determination to immortalize the fleeting. This is achieved through the seemingly paradoxical fact that he focuses on enduring, if not eternal, motifs, whose objective existence continually transforms through the ephemeral and perceptive emotion of the creator’s vision. Time and again, whether in Venice, Israel, the Pyrenees, or Provence in Sainte-Agnès, before the same rocks, mountains, foliage, and architectures, Celnikier feverishly inscribes the constructive lattice of graphic lines into the pictorial material, shaping it with interwoven colors. Through gesture after gesture—canvas after canvas, gouache after gouache, drawing after drawing—Celnikier declares his wonder that the same is always different. Like Monet’s Haystacks or Cathedrals, the temporal dynamic of the subject is recorded, precarious yet eternalized, in an image whose material and technique fix the immutable turbulence forever.

The ungraspable, the unforgettable fugitive, the unbearable, and the unrepresentable become the very subject of painting. But this comes at the cost of a colossal effort to confront the gap between the real and the conceivable, and more so, to confront the horror whose memory is both necessary and inescapable, yet must never, under any circumstances, be rendered picturesque or aestheticized.

As has often been noted, Celnikier was able, as early as the 1950s, to produce large painted compositions on the ghetto. However, until recent years, he confined his expression of the horrors of the Nazi camps to engraving. It was only recently, with the Birkenau Triptych and the large compositions that followed, that Celnikier demonstrated that the painter could rival the engraver in fulfilling this mission of the image-maker: to ensure that, no matter how unimaginable, memory and conscience endure through representations whose beauty lies in perpetually maintaining the vision of the unforgettable—visions that the imagination otherwise rejects.

Perhaps this was because the nature of engraving, grounded in the interplay of blacks and whites as a simulacrum of the luminous appearance of the world, seemed to Celnikier particularly suited to expressing this dark yet familiar, oppressive yet shared, exhausting yet solitary world of the dispersed and isolated Jewish people—a world sublimely captured by Rembrandt in his engravings. By contrast, achieving the same expressive effects through painting, especially to articulate something even more unthinkable than the Jewish narrative had been until then, required a longer maturation of his conception of how to give form to the formless and a greater, more interiorized confidence in his technical skill with colored material. This skill and virtuosity, in this context, are not aesthetic or stylistic but serve to individualize and personalize the act of transforming the material of painting into a unique and original signifier. For today and for the future, Celnikier’s work embodies a truth otherwise unspeakable.

In Isaac Celnikier’s engravings, the darkness of invasive inks envelops the flashes of suffering and tortured figures that pierce and streak through them, attempting to stifle the pale glimmers of life's relentless hopes as they stubbornly weave through the corrosive grasp of death. The lethal shadows—from the deepest blacks to the subtlest tracings of penumbras scratched along the grain of the paper—gnaw at the light, which nevertheless, against all odds, struggles to push back the oppressive night and undermine it. Life bursts through the death that constrains it, as light pierces the coal-black mass, infiltrating it with a tenuous yet determined will to be reborn from what smothers it. An eternally hard-won dawn, a disquieting and anguished morning, must constantly be reclaimed from the encroaching darkness. Light, fragile as foam, glimmers on the crashing waves of opaque chaos, crossing and climbing through it to emerge and attempt to flourish. Light denies the darkness that destroys it, for it is born from and against it. To live is always to try to live, to survive and revive, to be reborn against the inevitability of death and night.

In engraving, light often, if not always, culminates—however sparingly—in the immaculate purity of the paper's white. This trembling yet radiant network, preserved even imperceptibly within the layered and interwoven blacks, forms the substantial body of the night through which the lifeblood of light threads its way. In painting, such a counterpoint between the purity of white and the materiality of shadows and blackness must be transposed into a complex, impassioned, and furious dialectic. This is achieved through the tactile, material writing of the painted medium, where tones and hues embody light and values without relying on the same type of contrasts found in engraving. The oppositions and relationships of tones, as well as the material quality of the medium—whether smooth or rough, stretched or layered, brushed or knife-applied, thickened or scraped—along with the gestures of its application and the tools employed, all weave a chromatic labyrinth. This labyrinth destabilizes and confuses the conventional image, resulting in a dense texture from which a strong and complex representation nonetheless emerges. It navigates through the entrails of both depicted and depicting material, guided by a graphic structure sculpted within the substance itself, forming the figurative framework of this texture.

This graphic framework of colored material sharply outlines contours, silhouettes, and forms while also carving out, in relief or depth, the accidents and qualities of those forms. It transposes the accents of light and the zones and crevices of shadow without adhering to the illusionistic values of light and dark. In such material and graphic texture, all tonalities and forms of the pictorial medium are equal in this respect. The apparent and striking "chiaroscuro" is no longer a graded or nuanced system of luminous values but rather the very manipulation of chromatic substance. In works like the Birkenau Triptych, this substance often veers toward decoloration—a raging, exasperated false monochrome reminiscent of Jean Dubuffet’s textural works or the despairing palimpsests of Jean Fautrier's Hostages series. Some works are undeniably dark, others brighter, even radiant, while some lean toward a somber bichromatic mood or a more intertwined interplay of colors. Yet in all of Celnikier's works, the textured, rawly worked medium organizes the pictorial plane into a figuration where, despite the clarity of forms and the undeniable weight of meaning, the traditional opposition between figure and background, form and the space containing it, dissolves. Instead, the medium itself becomes a homogeneous continuum, where the figures are not contained objects but the dynamic expression of the image itself.

Even in certain portraits with plain backgrounds, these backgrounds, through their abstraction and starkness, reject any illusionistic realism of spatial representation. They assert themselves as spaces of figuration, unique to the portrait's depiction, rather than reproductions of a space that contains a representational figure constrained by its decorative environment.

In Isaac Celnikier's painting, figuration emerges from the act of applying the depicting substance, just as in his engraving, light emerges from the patient and persistent reserve of white. This white light confronts and battles against the graphic accumulation of countless cuts by burins and chisels, transforming the blackness into the very substance of light. Celnikier meticulously oversees the printing of his engravings, accepting only proofs that preserve and restore, through the thin layer of ink, the full depth, density, and luminous substance of his etched work. The inked material must penetrate the engraved surface and anchor onto the paper's grain with a carefully calculated thinness. Its transparency, opacity, or intermediate translucency must faithfully render the flesh of shadows and night from which the figures emerge. In the dazzling brilliance of even the smallest areas of white, light becomes the meaning and result of this labor.

Painting must, therefore, achieve within its substance and thickness the power of this light born from its very material complexity. Alongside the virtuosity of its handling—simultaneously deliberate and impetuously spontaneous—comes the demand for clarity in shaping the subject and its light within the opaque, chromatic substance. Even if that light is nothing more than suffocating shadow and darkness.

The evolution of Isaac Celnikier's painting and its current culmination in the Birkenau series stand as some of the most moving testaments to the consciousness and demands of a man and a painter.