Robert Achtemichuk

“Works on Paper” Brian Melnychenko Gallery, May 1983

The recent exhibition of 26 works on paper by Robert Achtemichuk, at the Brian Melnychenko Gallery (May, 1983), was a splendid example of subject matter being seduced into space. If an unseemly number of sibilants appears in that opening statement, they are there insisting upon the serpentine quality of Achtemichuk’s vision: it is gorgeous, undulant and altogether dangerous. It’s as if we’re back in the garden, and the snake and Eve have joined forces, if not forms.

The series of large etchings is especially satisfying, both technically and aesthetically. The images in them assume the repose and gender of odalisques, realized in warm, rusted colours. Achtemichuk composes carefully: the sweep of the arm and the upper body describe a backwards “S”; the head and breasts are placed firmly on the body, like weathered billiard balls. The body itself uncoils massively: you can almost feel the sound it makes, as if a sensuous anaconda were luxuriating in the remembered rhythms of an accordian.

In one etching, the figure rests in a float of rich green, red and purple, colours which register lovely highlights on the body, like the suffused shadow of a tattoo. Without making too outrageous a claim—and allowing adjustments in media—it’s worth intimating that these superb etchings are related to Picasso’s Boisgeloup sculptures and surrealist paintings from the early 1930s. Each is monumental and sensual; their posture simultaneously an invitation and a threat.

The monoprints (printer’s ink on zinc plates) are uncompromisingly luscious. While all figurative, they indicate Achtemichuk’s concern with getting the feeling of a perceptual experience right, rather more than getting the body right involved in the experience. The monoprints have to do with what it’s like to perceive a beautiful sexual woman and, to no less significant a degree, what it’s like to be a woman being perceived. They seem to come out of, and often embody, some kind of mutual recognition. There is nothing clandestine about this encounter between artist and model. Art-making for Achtemichuk is a combined act of homage, memory and applied imagination, and it’s all out in the open.

Occasionally, though, Achtemichuk is less lyrical. 90° in the Shade is an autobiographical re-construction in which a faceless, but comely, frizzy-haired nude invites the viewer to consider a pair of incriminating props: a once-erect candle beginning its meltdown on a table, and a red, exfoliated child’s windmill tossed onto the floor. The etching is a kind of sexy, visual allegory explaining why it couldn’t be any less than 90° in the shade.

Achtemichuk is, then, a hot-weather artist, at once sultry and elegant. This combination is the key to Isla Mujeres, a woodcut that has a good deal of the clarity and presence of an Alex Katz lithograph. I’m reminded of a roughly paraphrased Carly Simon lyric, about rubbing lime all over your body and smelling like the West Indies. My geography may be off, but I’m homing in on the sensation.

The least successful works are those which are most literal. One of the Embrasse monoprints reveals a couple engaged in a chiselled act of intercourse. Somehow the work is overly conscious of structure; when Achtemichuk abandons his natural humour or the intimacy of a full gesture, his work becomes too smart. In a sense, he has to resist his own facility. The most representational of the Embrasse lithographs has the effect of fingerprinting the figures with a palette knife: all the passion is studiously pressed and scraped away.

But the majority of these works on paper makes us ask, along with a sensual English poet, “what is all this juice and all this joy?” Achtemichuk doesn’t always give us the answer, but he does seduce us into remembering the sequence of physical sensations which pose, over and over again, joyous and juicy questions. ■

Robert Enright is the Western Correspondent for CBC’s Stereo Morning. He frequently writes about art in the prairies for Maclean’s.