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Saul Balagura brings us to the brink of understanding through his abstract expressionist paintings and accompanying poems. Balagura is not a witness, art was not his first career and English is not his first language. The facts would seem to mitigate against our being brought to understanding by this outsider, non-artist, Spanish speaking person. Poetry is anchored in language, but his work has a particularly sharp edge, perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, English being a second language.
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Subtleties of language are abandoned, the themes and forms of his poems are raw, the words rent from an inspired experience yielding a powerful accompaniment to the art. The artwork itself is edgy, explicit, and powerful and, like his poetry, is drawn from collective as well as personal experience. This exhibit is, in no small part, reflective of current events and human suffering. It shows us that we have not come so far as we may think from the Holocaust - only this time we are all witnesses. |
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