Meir Pichhdze and Balthus

The girl on the couch (42) is one of the figures about whom the artist remarked in a conversation: "The girl is still young, but in her seductive behavior she is already a grown woman." The element of temptation present in some of Meir Pichhdze's paintings of young girls and boys calls for an analogy with the emotional baggage underlining Balthuse's works, and especially paintings such as "Girl and Cat, 1937, which was selected to illustrate the cover of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita". If there is a common denominator between Balthus and Meir Pichhdze, it sevens to lay in Andre Lhotes comments about the former's paintings: that under the veil of lyricism, these paintings sizzle with hidden sexual obsessions.

Meir Pichhdze's descriptions of women are markedly enveloped by yearning for attention and intimacy. This sense, however, applies to other works as well. Children and adults, men as well as women, suffer from the same lack evoking in the viewer not only a sense of closeness, but often helplessness and compassion as well. In a series of widow portraits (48-49), alongside the pain and bereavement enhanced by the black garments and head covers, there exists a moving encounter between the solitude and pain of the young beautiful women and the pathos, anxieties and longings; like a blend of sex and death.

Like Balthus, Meir Pichhdze may also deny a conscious or repressed tendency to reveal dark facets in his figures. He perceives the possibility of binding them with dream, sex and provocation as entirely secondary to the direct portrayals of real figures, that are, in many respects, an integral part of his everyday life. The existence of a dimension associated with sexual initiation and the anxiety of adolescence, however, is found in Lina Chaplin's film: "A view with Meir Pichhdze",

2000, where the artist relates how as a boy he followed a perverse relationship of a minor's abuse by an elder relative. His

return to the "scene of crime" as part of the reconstruction of his life in Georgia is also linked to these following assertions: "I perceive childhood as a total helplessness. My father believed in the Georgian saying: "raise your child as an enemy and he will become the closest." It is a motto often recited by tough person; he finds it hard to give. He was always rough on me". Perhaps as an antithesis, Meir Pichhadze wanted to give his own children – Lauri and Robbie – all those things he never had: total freedom and financial backing. The concreteness and emotions typifying his childhood memories are direct and invasive, undoubtedly forming an important aspect that enhanced the impact of his work.

In the group of works executed upon his return from his visit to Georgia in 1999, Meir Pichhdze seems to have come ever closer to his inner world. In this act of opening to what he previously wished to keep hidden and closed, he nearly surprised himself. The exposure brought about a wave of rich coloration and a festive atmosphere of reconciliation and self acceptance. His most recent works manifest a vision that does not revel in childhood and adolescence in Georgia, but rather in bridging

The gulf between life and art, thereby possibly allowing for construction of a more beautiful, humane world. The yearning for construction of a more beautiful, humane world. The yearning for that unattainable delight calls to mind poet Daliha Rabikovitch's wonderful line:

There I found unparalleled delight,/ and it was on the seventh day, time of the Sabath,/ and the trees sent all their branches striving for the heights./ and the orb of the eye coveted the circle of the sun./ it was than that I knew it was unparalleled.