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“Funnyfarm” is a collection of psychological autopsies of the living, a mental disorder profile for each letter of the alphabet. A mixture of familiar and virtually unknown conditions whose designations I found visually charged. The images expose a true human nature that is violently at odds with the pleasant exterior we prefer to present. The subjects have lost their outershell and are in the last stages of their terminal condition. Some look directly at the viewer, the rest are well aware they are being watched. They are not ashamed. The paintings, worked on both sides of acetate sheets, are an experimental variation of animation cells. The acetate provides a smooth surface, easy to work on with brushes and etching tools to create dense textures of line and color. Photographic elements combined with pencil and ink drawings create the base for the acrylic paint. The compositions are designed to vary from painting to painting while bits and pieces of visual information combine to create a seamless pictorial unit. However, it is not the aesthetics of the technique but rather the beauty of the beasts that most consumes me. The backgrounds merely highlight the energy the characters radiate. The illustrated typeface is another dimension of “Funnyfarm”. No consideration was given to the shape or dynamic qualities of the characters when their corresponding icons were created, thus independence is guaranteed from any prerequisite form. Although each piece was composed and illustrated digitally, the final image lacks any fractal effects that would disturb the tradition of its origins. “Funnyfarm” instantly became the perfect title for a series of inner-portraits that rant and rave from behind the acrylic pigment that compose them. They are a visual palette of mental components, ingredients of our own individual psyches which we fear to express in words. It's easier with pictures, isn't it?” Viktor Koen May 1998
Mr. Koen, preoccupied about the frontier between reality and illusion, has been systematically exploring symbolic domains, discovering demons and how to survive them. In his yearly thematic voyages, he has evolved from wrestling with mythic heroes, to encountering urban figures, to suffering collisions with insurmountable obstacles, to being fixed in repair shops, to experiencing death and then protesting warfare. Having registered his respects with the cosmic Zodiac, he is now turning his search for order inward, riding alphabetically the roller coaster of the human condition from A to Z. The ride starts with the Attic Child and is completed with Zoophilia. Being an analyst of the unconscious creative process I interpret the sequence as telling the artist's autobiographic story from the times when he was a child about to be guillotined at birth until the time he painted his way out of fear and into falling in love with life. I thought Saloniki Jews were history, bleak cosmic silence. Maybe Anna Frank spoke on their behalf. But then there is a surprise called Viktor, a Jewish artist from Salonika, and his art is a Holocaust Memorial. I hear it in the voice of a lost civilization, the faces, the icons of agony, the images of anger and fear of individuals desperately clinging to life. His work makes Salonika into a suburb of Prague filled with Viennese ghosts discovering in the alphabet windows of opportunity to climb outside of their mass graves and to blow new life into the silent script. His characters protest the cold semblance of order as a parade of mental disorders. A major social injustice has driven these normal people crazy. The constraints of the letters are their windows to freedom. These anarchist figures are intertwined with order, they are not random images. The alphabet serves them to tell a story rationally, it is a perfect universe for these creatures to inhabit, and cryptically tell us something about us. The outpouring of emotions does not destroy the essence of the universal structure. The figures catch our attention by transforming the cold letters into primordial human readable hieroglyphics. There are several ways of interpreting art, of translating the personal language of the artist into a universal idiom. I chose a new way of looking at symbolism, identified as Formal Analysis. Mr. Koen’s work is perfectly suited for it. First I seek the holistic perspective, and then identify in its continuum the subtle but predictable moral order, that of a unit, which I call the Conflict Resolution Process. From this perspective the unconscious predictably structures any random free associations into a three act play having a beginning, a middle, and an end, or a moral conclusion. Mr. Koen’s realm of a double constraint, the alphabet, and the alphabetically arranged mental disorders allows us to detect this order uniting fragments into a singular drama. This drama reveals how the artist resolves his conflicts. This perspective unifies the random images into the very personal philosophy of life. The unconscious forces the artist to structure his free associations in spite of the randomness of the alphabet and of the yellow pages of mental illness into the overarching reappearance of the Aristotelian perfect universe, the dramatic holon, the necessary moral message, transforming chaos into order. This exhibit validates how spontaneous creativity, however absurd its subject matter, will by necessity stumble upon the manifestation of this unconscious moral order as the consensus that everything resolves itself. This perspective transforms the randomness of this exhibit into meaning. The inner order takes over the external constraints, as it actualizes humans commitment to healing and conflict resolution. Here is then the question, does this group of seemingly non connected images yield the personal autobiographic story of the artist from A to Z? Is the alphabet a sequence of celluloid frames accurately portraying the artist's emotional autobiography? Do these images yield the continuum of a personal scenario of suffering, of risk taking and fears, of defenses and setbacks, of a final dramatic compromise? Are the images together then affirming an inner transformation, an attitude adjustment? Do they also help the audience to experience healing right along with the artist by traveling his path of adventures starting with the Attic Child about to be sacrificed but then progressing emotionally to Zoophilia as the cryptic way of spelling falling in love with life? Are these mental disorders connected as the transformation from the passitivity of childhood into the activity of being Gifted, of the antagonism of Egomania and Narcissism into the cooperation of Oneirophrenia and Phantom Limb, and of the alienation of Hierophobia into the self doubt of Mental Ataxia and Wernicker's Encephalopathy, raising a glass to toast mutual respect? Does the alphabet of emotional adventures, a portrayal of absurdity, reveal the healthiest of personal realities, the elusive order, the syndromal construction of reality along a rational process, that rediscovers Genesis, Sabbath and Peace, all alternative forms of God? Are the twenty-six sketches portraying, the six role states of the mental dialectic, (stress-response, anxiety-defense, reversal-compromise), our unit of moral order, thus providing a confirmation on the nature of the universal unconscious as a predictable conflict resolution process? The assumption is then that these images, the masks of the innermost feelings of the wearer, unmask the elusive universal moral order. The assumption continues by postulating that this order also underlies and integrates our seemingly contradictory and divisive yet sacred paradigms of moral order. This is the time line between illusion and reality. Can what we regard as absurd have the same qualification for legitimacy as what we respect as the established forms of reality? Let us just remember that another son of Salonika was a man called Aristotle. Dr. Albert Levis |