Installation view of The Iconic Portrait Strand by Nestor Topchy – The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas
Artist Nestor Topchy’s 124-portrait series The Iconic Portrait Strand was exhibited at The Menil Collection art museum in Houston, Texas from August 4, 2023 to January 21, 2024. All photographs courtesy of The Menil Collection.
Iconic Portrait Strand
Nestor Topchy at the Menil
Even before a thought arises, we encounter beauty. A pebble. A strand of climbing jasmine. The shadow of an entrance ramp upon the feeder. The silhouette of a man or woman removing their shoe. It is an attribute of vision, of the eye, and by this, an operation of the body. The naming of it always comes after.
For some it is a familiar event, for others, a rarity. But it is always an entrancement, and never common, however often we might find it present to us. Even if,
by some uncanny operation, we were to encounter it successively, it would always possess the vitality of some thing we have not seen before. And so to experience beauty is to experience a kind of birth—an immediate and spontaneous form of surprised elation.
It is this first encounter—pre-conceptual—in which the observer is instantly transformed into a participant. It requires no act of will. It simply happens. A bit of blue
thread on the tablecloth. A pear. And some sort of distance between ourselves and what we see dissolves into a mysterious pleasure.
And there is joy in it, of course, an optical exuberance, whatever its tone, be it serene or tragic, baroque or simple. A joy that has within it the physics of a bodily
epiphany, a complete and individual, personalized discovery.
I am not writing here of those conceptions of beauty through we which we often approach and arrange experience. I am writing of surprise, of the shock a thing can
sometimes elicit within us, those rare and vital events that intrinsically, innately, through a mysterious act of expansive displacement, dissolve the bounds of the confined self and enlarge us. It is an awakening, a reordering of our conscious awareness. Such even a pin can sometimes do, with a speck of blood on its slender pedestal. Like metaphor, as Octavio Paz has written, our encounters with beauty reveal the hidden unity within the things of the world. It is a moment of unwilled and unresisted surrender in which we recognize the unfamiliar, the unexpected, as part our own.
Such was my experience on first seeing this series of paintings by Nestor Topchy. Leaning from a small ledge against the whitewashed drywall around the perimeter of his studio, they startled me. Or better perhaps to say, they took me. Whether they gave off light, or drew it from me, I do not care to know. Either way, the room was transformed.
Beth Secor and Sofonisba Anguiss
Walter Hopps
I suspect we are all familiar with such experiences, whether they arise through the mediums of art or nature, an encounter with a woman or a man. I certainly hope so. But we know, too, that pleasure of this immediate, responsive, optical type can be fickle. We know how knowledge sometimes can deprive us of our initial enthrallments. That images mislead. Who has never felt, encountering simply the face of another person, a kind of excitement or rapture, only to find, after hearing them speak, after getting to know them, the exultations of attraction descend into plainness, or even distaste and revulsion? And so—because we know this—we also know that experience requires, even demands, investigation, and that this is, in a sense, our responsibility, for we know that the value of appearances all too often depends upon the substances we discover within them.
And so we value a thing not simply for what it appears to be, but for what it does and what it harbors. And what it does is beckon. It is an invitation.
Rose Arriaga
Arielle Masson
Because of their social nature, this is specifically and particularly true of the arts. Some works of art simply strike a single note or two—and all we find is a wall at the end of a short hallway in a drab hotel with a neon facade. After a brief glimpse, they obscure or limit. They turn us away. But others are passages that, like the eyehole in the narrow end of a kaleidoscope, open out onto a landscape of coercive associations. And it is within these conceptual refractions— where surface and depth, form and implication, contextualize each other–that we inhabit an expansion of our experience of the beautiful which justifies our initial excitements.
Topchy’s series more than satisfies me in this regard. For what I find accompanying these beautiful objects is a complex and exuberant hieratic art. It has the
feel of an incarnation in which, through the vehicle of the artist’s vision, the historical and the eternal coincide, not as an overwhelming singularity, but as a confluence of twin rivers, divided and forked, emerging from a fundamental source, neither of which can be separated from the other.
Here’s what I mean. As a specific form within an explicitly religious tradition, the Icon is a literal repository of divine energy, and thus conveys within it a sacred space.
The saints represented, as agents of divinity, are objects of worship, and as such are inviolable, free from the urgencies and devastations and derisions of matter. Made of matter, in time, the Icon transcends both by manifesting as a form of eternity. Even destroyed, it is indestructible.
Al “Kool B” LeBlanc
Bora Kim
Thus, by employing this medium, crafted, I must add, by a meticulous fidelity to the ancient and traditional means of fabrication, to represent the images of friends and mentors, of profane subjects, Topchy rejects the traditional notions that divide the sacred and the profane, insisting instead on the equivalent necessity of the ordinary as a container through which the extraordinary is revealed. Such work has an epiphanic, revelatory cast, for while clearly not canonized by an official edict of the church, Topchy’s subjects are beatified by context, or in other words, by the artist’s gesture. They too, he proclaims, are manifestations of a divine embodiment.
Additionally, via his use of sacred geometry, and the conceptual space of the demekon1, he attempts to reconcile the contemporary antagonism between the ratios of limit and the illimitable, of mathematics and the imagination, in search of a transcendence that need not reject a linear rationalism, but transform it. By its very
operation the demekon absorbs reason and number, and thus mortality, into an immeasurable equation. A round and an ascending spiral. A sphere.
1 The Deme is Topchy’s term for a geometrically derived visual module that precedes language. Things are known and named later.
The Deme is part of a larger systemic geometry known as the Demegraphia that is part of a yet larger system, the Demokosm. Some demes have a generally verifiable association within the viewers mind—for example, most of us can agree, “that one looks like a dog, etc.” Consequently, a Deme is like a Meme but visual.
When a Deme embodies an image, it becomes a Demekon, maintaining its agency while simultaneously subsumed by the collected body.
Topchy’s “Display-sed Personae” portraits use traditional Byzantine materials—egg-vinegar tempera, honey, beer, vodka, fig milk, cloves, linseed oil and gold leaf—painted on Deme-shaped wooden panels.
Forrest Prince
Terrell James
Nonetheless, this is not a sentimental, otherworldly art which intrinsically favors a transcendent realm over the apparent world of blood and bone. We could say instead that Topchy’s hieratic is a hagiography of immanence—one that is as interested in this world as the supposition of any other. His ‘profane’ subjects, circumscribed by their literal ’frames,’ are the manifestations of a secular, temporal identity embodied in a sacred field, and Topchy thus refuses to relinquish or abandon his subjects’ familiar, canny presences as men and women in favor of a divinized latency. What he proposes is the elision of a severe distinction between the two. These ‘saints’ are our neighbors. They might bend down to adjust a dog collar or wade through a puddle in the backyard to unclog an old French drain. They might slam a door or open one.
We see this again in the demekon as a genetic linkage. While portraits inherently celebrate individuality as an isolate and discrete occasion, raising the individual to
prominence, the demekon operates as a counterweight which identifies the individual as a resonant species formed by a network of interrelationships without which they would have no existence, sacred or otherwise. By placing each portrait in a communal, biological, or biosocial context, he recalls the famous Zen phrase, Not Many, Not One. Individuals, he asserts, are not isolated beings, but the evolving culminations of a complex and hallowing interactivity.
This is a rhetorical and a metaphysical gesture. It rejects both a concept of the individual as a being who possesses an autonomy severed from its connections to other beings, as well as the demographic habit which relegates the individual to the status of a numerical abstraction. Instead, he proposes that neither the communal nor the individual exist outside the interfusion of their metaphysical and secular characters. For Topchy, the physical is the indivisible enactment of a sacred activity, of eternal energy in transient form, without which divinity would have neither expression nor being.
This then is why I found my immediate experience of Topchy’s paintings wholly sustaining—an object of beauty inseparable and consonant with its conceptual depth. A deductive argument, yes, but a poem as well, one as soft and subtle and as lovely as a slow moving goldfish surfacing at the edge of a pond. This is an art of ideas and objects, of science and imagination, of technology and feeling, of the relative and the absolute, and finally, of mutuality, respect—and of beauty. One could even say a moral art, in a classical sense, though the contemporary politics of morality might obscure what I mean by saying so. And yet I think it is a moral art, in the most generous and fundamental way. An art of equanimity and welcome. Of the numinous in the mundane exceptional. An alert art, present and wakeful.
During a five-minute session, Topchy measures the composition with a camera Lucida, draws the sitter from life, and takes a digital snap shot for color reference. Topchy paints the image over a period of months. Sitters are recruited through word of mouth via “station 32,” Haitian slang for the number of teeth in our mouths. Direct person-to-person contact and transmission replaces computer hardware with human “wetware.” Through real-time art, the portraits enjoin individuals in a growing corpus as
each new sitter’s likeness is added The portraits belong to the Demekon family. Each individual portrait functions like a single gene maintaining an agency within a larger body, itself a system and identity positioned within a yet larger unseen agency. As a whole, the entire group is assembled into a socio-cultural strand of DNA.
Andrea and Lola Grover
Robert Pruitt
William Blake wrote that the most sublime act is to place another before you. And this art is an enactment of that willingness. Here is a man with clay on his boots. A dog with no hair. Maybe a vineyard on the slopes of the Andes.
Even when we cannot see it, it is always there before us. A woman hanging upside down from a chin-up bar. A smart, young girl with a beautiful smile, a bit of
starfruit on her plate. The opportunity is our own. And it is shared.
About the author:
Randall Watson is the author of No Evil is Wide, (Madville Publishing), which received the Quarterly West prize in the novella, The Geometry of Wishes (Texas Review Press), a finalist in the Juniper and Tampa Review Poetry Prizes, The Sleep Accusations, which received the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize at Eastern Washington University, (currently available through Carnegie Mellon University Press), and Las Delaciones del Sueno, translated by Antonio Saborit with an Introduction by Adam Zagajewski, published in a bi-lingual edition by the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico. Recent poems are currently appearing in Willow Springs, and a new graphic edition of No Evil Is Wide was published in August, 2023.