The Drawers - Alan Glicksman   Commentary written by Julie Oakes

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Beauty & Obsession

The quotidian round is inescapable. It is a task itself, work, to get rid of the niggling characters who constantly converse in the head. Alan Glicksman upsets the apple cart. He spills the beans. He regurgitates the cud. The brainy babble takes shape and the permutations of comings and goings, getting and winning, continue to agitate but from a different vantage point. The characters are frozen in their freaky symbolism on the pristine page. It's up to the viewer to make sense; if that's the aim of the exercise - to make sense. Perhaps it makes sense just to get it out.

Glicksman’s work is an intimate disclosure like a telling of secrets that takes a weight off the mind. Yet 'All' is not revealed. It is an overload of information without the key to the map from which to take bearings. Where does one go with all of this? This brings the question back to whether or not the quotation from the Glicksman pen, the confession from the Glicksman brush, has to be dealt with or whether it’s physical manifestation, as an art piece, is sufficient. The 'subject', the outpourings of the artist, is now the 'object' and a drawing is presented.

Alan Glicksman uses some symbols repetitively; the light bulb, honey bees, dinosaurs, reptiles with many legs and there are even recognizable Glicksman portraits in the line up. The perspective is either an overall field of characters or a shallow side view, much like a Roman relief. The historical associations are numerous and yet don't logistically jibe; Egyptian papyrus and tomb paintings, Roman temple friezes, aboriginal textiles, Aztec iconography, Picasso’s paintings (Guernica-like imagery with the big floating heads on the strung-out necks and the female profiles). The work is as informed as it is referential. It's also pertinent, for even if the exact and precise meaning of the symbolism is missed, there are universal clues; the biggest one being the recognition of the mind space. The world that Alan Glicksman has depicted is the one that most of us live in where variety flickers in quick takes to a crazy cacophonic sound track that almost overwhelms - but not quite! We take it in, daily, and Glicksman puts it out, daily. His work is the testimony of a man who lives as an artist, making art from his life, talking about that which he knows

Copyright © 2006,  Headbones Gallery, The Drawers