''Paul Lisak was born in Bayonne on January 30th 1967, of a French mother and a Russian father. At the age of two, his family left for England, where he was brought up and still lives today.
After having passed his Baccalauréat at the “Lycée Français de Londres”, he decided to enter Saint Martin’s School of Art in London. Paul Lisak has talent, but in art school he hasn’t yet found his own style. He believes he can now prove himself best as a self-taught artist. Indeed, since 1989, when he received his diploma, his powerful style has been ever enriching itself , the themes increasing in number, and his work gaining in depth…
Today, as accomplished a musician as he is a painter, he sees himself as being inspired amongst other things by experience, science, mythology, music and theology. His ambition is to integrate these elements into his paintings. His masters div the likes of Titian, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Rubens as well as modern giants like Picasso, Matisse, Bacon and Rothko. However, what Lisak desires the most is to remain a free agent, free to make use of the techniques he feels comfortable with and believes in, free to say no to the finality proper of modern “conceptual” work, but most of all free to own his own vision and voice, an increasingly difficult thing to do in our globalized and institutionalised 21st century world. He often reflects on questions that are so topical today – questions relating to religious issues, questions dealing with the individual, questions regarding the ambivalences between science and theology, or those concerning wars and conflicts of all natures – and he readily uses myth as a medium in his artistic expression. His paintings, are beautiful, their effects reminiscent of Caravaggio or Tintoretto. They are suffused with mystery and their brilliant compositions recall the masters of the XVI and XVII centuries… And yet both characters and themes are our contemporaries. This is, indeed, a strange combination of Beauty, of Reality past and present – our most prosaic present, of Horror, but also of Hope. ''
''As a contemporary artist, Paul Lisak’s work is, at first,remarquably accessible. It is atypical of European art in the 21st century. Not for him the dubious seduction of “conceptual art” or the half-ironic style that pays lip service to the past by knowing self-quotation. Instead, Lisak is, and enjoys the acclaim of being, a somewhat old fashion artist, He even selects his canvas types to match the intended “feel” of the subject.
When we first confront his canvasses, their very size as well as subject matter reminds us that there is an artist whose debt to the Old Masters, especially to Titian, Tintoretto and to Caravaggio, to name only three, is at once overt. Yet his style remains very much his own, even when his working method and his artistic conviction lie closest to his great forbears. As a result, this is immediately comforting (as it is so freely recognisable) while it still offers a challenge as it seems unexpected, almost out of place, in the contemporary field.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Lisak feels most at home with both religious and secular scenes that are often treated within a mythical or historical context (broadly “narrative histories”) and in portraiture. These are fields that few artistes currently believe are worth visiting. Yet it is here that the greatest of European Masters have always commanded attention, and Paul Lisak’s work reminds us of the importance of such antecedents.
Whereas many modern artists might use “the story” of a religious fable or the myth of past gods in some sort of ironic way, Lisak imbues them with a truth that is very much his own. Religion, he avers, is simply about being human, not about being Christian, or Muslim, or something other. It is the humanity and the very human-ness of being that counts most and interests him. In this approach, it is not that he appropriates a “religious vocabulary” for his pictures, as if buying an “of the peg” outfit, but rather that his observation of human nature (Power, Greed, Gentleness, the Unexpected) is framed in a traditional way that may be open to a religious reading, but is essentially drawn from Nature.
This concern for humanity is perhaps most clearly apparent in his portraits, where the faces tell a story with an almost indecent immediacy. The faces that meet us are at once wistful and calm, contemporary and timeless. At times, the brushwork is ruthless and a close inspection of the canvas shows how little the portrait bears relation to the demand for a flattering piece, whereas it is enlivened by a psychological insight so that we encounter the man beneath the surcoat, the soul beneath the face.
In his allegorical works (such as “Triptych 2003”), Lisak has taken both Christian and pre-Christian mythology as a way of commenting on the world of his own day. The conflict of East and West, of Israeli and Palestinian, of Arab and non-Arab, of Muslim and non-Muslim, is treated of seriously as our responsibility. The work is violent, much as Rubens consciously was, and yet inescapably it includes poetic moments, passages in which there is a real sense of the power of art to shape and conform society even at its most ill ordered and self-destructive.
Unlike, say, John Keane, Lisak has chosen to stay with realism. Lisak is clearly quite prepared to take cudgels and to fight for justice, for Peace, for an end to War, but one feels that the real conviction in his soul is to fight for ART, for the gift of an inspired way of healing the world. And if that informs humanity in our secular age of passing passions, and can prevent useless political or religious waste, so much the better.''
Dr Nicholas Cranfield
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