What I have seen of Isaac Celnikier's work, what I know of his craft, and what his biography tells—a life scorched throughout his youth in the horrors of the camps—renders my words hesitant.

A feeling of powerlessness inhabits me. How can one speak of the tragic humanity of such a creation, so powerful, so unforgettable once encountered? How can one evoke the intertwined bodies in these grids of lines that resemble so many wounds, scars, blows, and emaciated limbs? And above all, how can one describe these faces where the eyes—dark circles in which the flame of life still flickers, but for how much longer?—bear the unbearable gaze of men and women who ask: why this hell? Why was this allowed to happen, you who see, you who watch? Why are we trapped in our suffering, in this grid-like universe, in this darkness that has made us victims? And how could you accept this?

If a work of art is valuable because it pulls you into itself, removing you from your condition and involving you in what it reveals and expresses, then the work of Isaac Celnikier is among the most powerful one can ever see.

It transports us into an unacceptable reality, recreated.

Not that it narrates, literally, what Isaac Celnikier saw and experienced. Of course, it bears witness. But it is in no way anecdotal. It recreates what can only be grasped through art—that is, what was lived and what, in real time, would normally dissipate and dissolve with the passage of time and the disappearance of lives. It reveals the relationship men and women had with their bodies, with one another, with their memories and dreams, with their anguish, with death, and also with hope. It shows—since it is a pictorial work—what cannot be seen: namely the soul—what other word could suffice?—that is, the thoughts and questions that must have been obsessive when those enduring the horror still had the strength to reflect. What does this mean for humanity? What is this hell on earth? Are the executioners, whose actions are visible only through the disfigured bodies and faces they left behind, truly men? “If this is a man...,” wrote Primo Levi, himself a survivor and creator. Isaac Celnikier, with his painting and engraving, asks the same question as the Italian writer. And he succeeds in restoring the unspeakable to us, making the vanished reappear: the suffering, the fear, the crowds where the individual is reduced to a shadow, where the person becomes nothing, and reminding us that within these masses, these accumulations of black hatchings, there are destinies, lives, faces, eyes, and therefore pain—each one unique.

It is in this relationship between the individual dissolved into the mass (this magma) and the emergence—also in the mystical sense—of the unique unity that is a life, that the singularity of Isaac Celnikier's work is affirmed. And in doing so, it conveys the essential: both the malevolent attempt by the executioners to reduce men and women to objects, to transform bodies into mere matter, and, on the other hand, the resistance of the individual to this negation of humanity.

Because Isaac Celnikier's work exists, because it speaks of this never-ending struggle, humanity prevails. Once again, the soul tears itself away from matter, the individual from darkness.

But nothing, of course, is ever truly won. Distress is always present, capable at any moment of enveloping life, smothering it. Everything is fragile. Each day could be—is—a day of selection. Isaac Celnikier reminds us of this. And even when he paints portraits of women (Anne or Judith, for example), the very texture of the painting conveys the gravity, the unease of someone who knows. It is not just a memory effect, but a profoundly philosophical question that recurs—anguishing, heavy with the weight of what actually happened, of what Isaac Celnikier experienced. While we did not endure it, through him, we live it.

In this way, Isaac Celnikier enters the pantheon of unforgettable works—names timidly come to mind, yet they are there, and so why not mention them, not as indications of a direct pictorial lineage, but as evocations: Breughel and Goya, Caravaggio and Kokoschka. Isaac Celnikier succeeded in transmuting the historicity of a specific personal experience—present in each of his works and to which he remains scrupulously faithful—into an eternity of suffering and an unending inquiry into the meaning of life, and thus into the presence within us of Good and Evil.