At the core of Tsuki Garbian’s solo exhibition,Double Mars, lays the artist's struggle to find his unique voice.Garbian chooses Bruce Lee as a metaphor and steps into battle against the great masters of the European painting tradition - Titian, Caravaggio, Velasquez and Rembrandt; who contributed, among others, to the creation of the contemporary accepted image of the painter (the intellectual, subversive and critical one). Garbian embraces Raffi Lavie’s (120 by 120 cm) plywood platform as a battlefield in which, for a slight moment while copying them, he even wishes to become the great masters themselves, gliding in and out of their skin all along his struggle against them; all that, in order to present his persona to us, his identity that constitutes through confrontation with others.
In Double Mars, Garbian exhibits himself by a repetitive and obsessive painting action. His series of self portraits, made by intensive brush strokes, populating crowded compositions which in turn fake a stutter (part of them being painted left handed), and stand aloof to an accurate citation of canonical masterpieces. "To cite before beginning is to give the key through the resonance of a few words, the meaning or form of which ought to set the stage" writes Jacques Derrida in
Archive Fever, and adds: "… we must also remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, in-dissociable from the death drive. And thus from destruction…". Garbian doesn’t choose the victorious position, the sanctified memorizing act, however, he chooses to exhibit Rembrandt’s portrait as merely a sketch to his own self portraits in an aggressive act of liberation.
