Compelling Images, Gaston Zvi Ickowicz: Field

It is not merely vibrant hues and shapeshifting forms that enamor the restless human. Rather, a successful image creates a sense of permanence that carries with it a longing that is unparalleled in the temporal realm of reality. For example, a photo of a place becomes more than the place. The image of the place is no longer about the place but about the feeling of being in that place, the desire to capture the feeling of being in that place. Of course, that cannot be done because as soon as you taste or feel the longing for something that you suddenly identify with, it is gone. Likewise, a photograph of a person is no longer just a flattened view of a human, but the feeling of looking and standing with that person and wanting to know that person’s thoughts and feelings and questions and quirks and nuisances. Compelling images articulate a feeling of authentic desire or emotional experience.

East to West 2024, by Gaston Zvi Ickowicz (Courtesy Gaston Zvi Ickowicz)

As people, we are designed to seek comfort zones. But what does it mean when the comfort zone becomes the avoidance of the zone in which the comfort was implied? What does it mean when the world forgets the things repeating themselves?

A photograph is challenging conceptually, it is something that repeats the source without actually being able to repeat the essence of the source.  A photograph is not a souvenir in the same way an object beckons towards an encompassing non-theatrical space. The photograph repeats what it can’t repeat. It asks the viewer to do the dirty work, to fill in the implicit memory tied to the thing that resembles itself but asks for more.

Hideout 2023-24, by Gaston Zvi Ickowicz (Courtesy Gaston Zvi Ickowicz)

Gaston Zvi Ickowicz’s body of work, “Field,” masterfully transcends a purely retinal experience, inviting a deeper engagement with its themes. Field challenges viewers to confront the tension of living perpetually on high alert while also questioning how not to. Reflecting on the fleeing Nova participants amid the startling “Red Color” alerts, the field becomes a dual symbol: a space of fleeing hope and one of profound, fearful vulnerability for those tragically abducted and murdered. The landscape itself is stripped of any chance at banality. In the absence of Ickowicz’s evocative photography, the viewer is left oscillating between volatility and stagnation, mirroring the emotional disarray the work captures.

Figures are absent, yet their presence lingers, rebroadcast in the space they once inhabited. Ickowicz’s images remain intentionally illegible, harkening to the idea that much of our ambient visual world derives its meaning and sustenance from the people and essences that animate it. Through his work, he crafts an aesthetic treatise on history for Israel and the Jewish people—where words falter, the act of looking becomes a means of synthesis. In this, there is an invitation: to remember.