Jenin Imprints by Raymond Prucher (2006)

 Marcelo Guimarães Lima

 

 artwork by Raymond Prucher
 

Raymond Prucher’s Jenin ImPrints is an exercise in succinctness: small black (or gray) and white linoleum prints, “modest” in means and dimensions. And yet, these images speak of a contemporary tragedy of global significance: the tragedy of a people, the Palestinians under occupation, daily victims of abuse, oppression and genocide.

No wonder Raymond Prucher, besides being a gifted visual artist, is also a poet. Poetry is distilled language, that is, life itself condensed to its essentials and expressed, manifested in a sign. Signs are gestures designed in time and imprinted in the mind and the heart. Poetry is the substance of language and memory. It is the graphic sign as such, that is, an imprint made by markings in time and space.

Raymond Prucher’s series elaborates on visual records of the massacre of the Jenin refugee camp in 2002. His skillful exploration of graphic language utilizes a strategy of reduction: to lay bare the essentials, to maximize formal resources. We may say: a sort of visual equivalent of the lessons of the Palestinian resistance.

Over the tents of the refugee camp, the sky is a series of open cuts, wounds in the white surface of the paper. The burned head of a man is a black mass, a dark shape plastered against the picture plane. Corpses among a field of debris are flattened, crushed down both metaphorically and literally: the very process of creating the linoleum print is a series of cuts, eliminations, reductions, condensations of the image. The process of impression is the actual crushing of the printing paper’s surface in the transfer of the image from the matrix.

The clear-cut shapes in Raymond Prucher’s Jenin prints condense and expand, vanish and disappear, repeat and proliferate. Image and ground change places, bodies and images disintegrate and are recomposed. Between light and dark, the harsh contrast remains. A kind of visual catharsis: art is here the human instrument that allows us to look straight into the face of tragedy.

 

 

 

Jenin imPrints  by Raymond Prucher and Etel Adnan, 
foreword and poem by Marcelo Guimarães Lima,
published by Color Gang Édition -Yves Orly, 
 Saint-Génis-des-Fontaines (Occitane), France

2006

 ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 2915107203
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-2915107203

 

 

 

 

  artwork by Raymond Prucher