Like Le Corbusier in his mid-’50s pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp, Shraga Weil turns the conventions of his art inside out. Le Corbusier inverted the Gothic relationship of mass and space, with a nod to Einstein’s discovery that mass bends space. Weil in his current show, “Memories & Dreams,” at the Pucker Gallery focuses on the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, but these two, not to mention God, get upstaged by the wood for the fire and by the ram that, in the end, is sacrificed in place of Isaac. The result raises unnerving questions about representation (how do we depict reality?), theology (who is this God that demands sacrifices?), and even human discourse (how do we communicate with each other?).

Shraga Weil was born in Nitra, in what was then Czechoslovakia, in 1918. He studied at the Prague School of Art; after spending part of World War II in jail, he emigrated to Israel, where he has lived with his family since 1947. In his introduction to the “Memories & Dreams” catalogue he alludes to his “atheistic philosophy,” and it’s not for me to contradict an 82-year-old artist of his stature, but everything in his work bespeaks a tough, sometimes angry, confrontation with the Deity. Weil the man may believe that God does not exist, but Weil the artist wants answers.

And he’s a formidable opponent. Who else has taken up the cause of Abraham and Isaac’s ram? Weil’s interest goes back at least as far as the 1963 color lithograph Symbols of Pesach, where the ram cavorts unmindful of its fate. In the 1966 color lithograph The Ram and the Dove, the ram, looking somewhat like Weil himself, has emerging from its head a tangle of leaves, in which the dove nests: sacrifice, redemption, rebirth. But why does God demand sacrifice? In 1970 Weil’s only son was killed when a tractor overturned on him; Weil responded with “Akedah” (“The Binding”), a series of seven serigraphs that transcend Genesis 22 to ask what Abraham and Isaac are thinking. The seventh serigraph, Because You Have Not Withheld Your Son, recalls the end of Euripides’s Ion, where it’s not clear that Kreousa feels Pallas Athene’s blessing is adequate compensation for all she’s gone through.

Curtain raiser for the Zodiac and the star of one of the 20th century’s most affecting poems, Salvatore Quasimodo’s “Oggi ventuno marzo” (“Today the 21st of March”), the ram, symbol of potency and creativity as well as sacrifice, is both protagonist and antagonist in “Memories & Dreams.” In Within the Thicket (the show’s Abraham & Isaac works are all mixed media on board), it kneels demurely (as if in a Nativity), almost obscurely, within the wood that will be the means of its extermination, the fire adumbrated by oranges and yellows of blazing warmth and poignance. (Weil’s Holocaust imagery is subtle but never in question.) In The Ram and the Thicket it’s standing on its hind legs and stretching for some delectable bit of foliage — again from the tree that will be its destruction. Together gives the impression of a happy family portrait: Abraham, Isaac, ram — but Isaac is bound (are we ever free from the fate of being God’s sacrifice?) and the ram is bound, and it’s not a pet. Memories of a Sacrifice displays the ram’s skull over the bound wood, as if we were all just trophy animals.

And the wood is ubiquitous. Weil is surely thinking of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, and of the tree as a symbol of the Jewish faith, its roots deep in the earth, its branches reaching up to Heaven. But everywhere in “Memories & Dreams” this tree is cut, bound, and burned. In The Dove Above the Branches the bound branches are surmounted by a dove — but is God’s offer of redemption acceptable? (Think of another Pucker artist, Samuel Bak: would a dove appearing in his Pardes canvases render God less culpable?) The Dove in the Studio shows those branches surmounted by a phoenix firebird that suggests both leaf and flame; Weil seems to ask whether God can make his son rise from the ashes the way Jesus rose from the tomb. In Mixture the branches are bound with striped prayer shawls over a pile of leaves. Joined depicts branch-like trees upright, growing — and bound together, as if we human trees had from the beginning been created for sacrifice. Isaac never appears without these branches on his head; in Harvest Gathering he seems oppressed by them (think of the Ten of Wands in the tarot deck); in Harvest Time he’s a ghostly chartreuse presence outside the central color square, as if only his wood-bearing hands and the wood itself were real. Abraham turns up only in Together and as a brooding figure in In Preparation (where the ram is represented as its Hebrew characters caught in a thicket); God appears as a mere pointing hand in In Preparation (where there’s no sign of Isaac).

The rest of “Memories & Dreams” is made up mostly of serigraph series like “Book of Life” and “The Gates of Sinai.” Weil’s vocabulary is as dense as the ash of a neutron star: branches (fuel for sacrifice), leaves (the same, as well as being the leaves of holy books), feathers (from the dove, and the means by which Scripture is written), Torah scrolls (also flammable), candles (the gloria leaf inside a candle in the Dream serigraph from “The Book of Life” is not to be missed). Everywhere you look, Weil provokes thought: see how the artist’s table in Heirloom in the Studio (acrylic on board) becomes the altar of The Scroll and the Altar (mixed media on board). There’s joy here too: while his images interrogate, his Mediterranean colors celebrate. But he still leaves you with that bound ram, and that bound wood, and those questions.

Issue Date: March 22-29, 2001