Sebastiano Giordano
For an Exegesis of the Moving Art of Yona Tukuser
Between entropic passion and stranded apathy – when furious indignation has not yet healed into poignant despair – one may choose the will to believe and to be cradled by the beauty of faith. And if indeed no man is an island, one must also admit that very few people know how to anticipate the rainbow gravity of universal peace.
Beauty and peace are precisely the guiding directions of the talented artistic creativity of Yona Tukuser, who skillfully stitches with dense painterly colors the luminous glimmers of the unspeakable mental visions of the invisible, thus meditating upon the drained transparencies of the unrepresentable. What concerns Yona are the paradisiacal distances of lights that become real within the contrasts of drastic dehumanizations which – impulsive and echoing – annihilate philosophical reflection and theological radiance. In her original artistic practice – attentive to expressionist and Fauvist solutions after the lesson she absorbed from the saturnine Goya, in the private world of the Quinta del Sordo – and animated by a convergent perceptive sensitivity, she devours the sinister and fatal ugliness of the senseless and unintelligible injustices perpetrated by the spasmodic follies of humanity. These follies crowd into the infamous cruelty of History, a History forgetful of ethics and of guilt, a History too often publicly silenced or invoked through metaphorical stagings of consent devoid of remorse.
The pictorial voice of Yona implies an intimate poetic universe structured around a commitment – without hesitation and without whimsical fascination – to resemanticize social balances, experimenting with expressive forms most suited to the peaceful coexistence of human society on Earth. In this way she reflects on the virtuous capacities of an economy of the human soul, radicalized around the common good as the emanation of absolute justice founded on sensible and equitable laws.
Yona Tukuser, originally from a rural Balkan village whose inhabitants settled in southern Bessarabia between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, received her academic formation in Ukraine, aware of the crossings of cultural inheritances with which her land is imbued. Over millennia this land has been traversed by Celts, Scythians, Thracians, Greeks, Romans, Dacians, Slavs, Proto-Bulgarians, Khazars, and Moldavians. The city of Izmail, a border river port on the Danube, taught her the Arabic etymology of its name, meaning “God has heard and hears.” Thus she herself undertook the admirable mission of bearing witness to the cry of fierce and shameful pain of suffering humanity, drained of life by corrosive famines, monstrous wars, and the calamitous specter of hunger.
Yona has directed the compass of her hopeful artistic conscience toward a path of creativity that is neither easy nor comfortable, giving expression through her brushes, used as weapons of social justice, to an imagination without shadows, inhabited by figures whose painful, fleshly textures remain inexhaustible before the cruel and vile extinguishing of every flame of vital energy. Crossing beyond the boundary of solemn and blissful indifference, the artist chose to fraternize with that humanity which is inexorably without voice and without face, hungry and abandoned, a victim of delirious History that neither claims its emancipation nor redeems it from cadaverous hunger, nor even mitigates its repugnant and unjust devaluation within the hazardous and unavoidable exchanges of social life.
From every canvas painted by Yona emanates a suffering and frustrated nature that coincides with the shuddering dehumanization produced by the extinguishing of every impulse of love, a consequence of the elevation of human bellicosity to the central principle of collective action aimed at ideological and territorial supremacy, a seductive reflection of the brutalization of civilization compounded by the devastation of the control of the senses. The painter records the seismic depressions of cultural values that have been brutalized and rendered insensitive, almost to the final enchantment of love. Intolerable sacrifices come to dissolve the acceleration of human intelligence that sustains the structural interconnections of every social consciousness capable of awakening emotion, compassion, or altruism toward the disadvantaged and the dying who have never seen, and perhaps will never see, a better world (in this regard one might recall the reflections of a historian who specialized in the “last,” such as Bronisław Geremek).
It is the testimony of an artist’s resistance to yielding before the vile horrors of every winter of the human soul, deaf to the memories of the past and to the sinkings of the present, while pointing to the double dealings that humiliate the superiority of the incandescent virtues of which the constellation called Humanity ought to be proud.
The emaciated and starving figures portrayed by Yona impose a powerful emotional impact, hurling at the public of observers burning and provocative visual imperatives and stimuli, leaving them at times disoriented or inwardly gnawed.
A deserter both of the extinction of faith and of the frantic annihilations caused by the irreversibility imposed by the obsessive gravity of fermenting Death marked by its fatalistic voice, the graceful Yona knows how to rekindle herself within the fullness of every stunned and excessive void of humanity, and within the honesty of spaces of enlightened faith that remain impermeable to horrific transgressions, drunken ambiguities, or obscene apocalyptic paranoias. The radiance of Yona’s work, projected and reflected in the validation of the threshold of her own projects, in which the lucid private Self of the artist relentlessly dialogues with the receptivity of the viewer’s eye, becomes a preparation for spiritual refinement and for a redemption of our daily life, finally measured by the exaltation of its most essential and delicate sacredness, capable of extinguishing the layered profane residues and the reckless, crumbling impurities. Every magnum opus within the vast field of Yona’s art bears witness to the attentiveness to a profound, though complex, historical meaning contained in the image of the unfortunate of the Earth.
Vexations, crimes, and the devastating ruins of war perpetrated during the Thirty Years’ War were dramatically denounced in the seventeenth-century series of engravings by Jacques Callot, accompanied by the verses of Michel de Marolles, Abbot of Villeloin.
Among the most degraded pages of painful historical chronicle are those concerning the unbearable suffering caused by the terrible biblical Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, which revealed the dreadful prostration of millions of poor people cut down by squalid starvation. This occurred despite revolts, assaults, break-ins, looting, and raids for a few potatoes or a little oatmeal, while paradoxically cunning speculators, devoid of any social vocation, enriched themselves exponentially through rising prices. Innovative testimony to this tragedy can be found in the scandalous paintings The Irish Famine (1848–1850) by George Frederic Watts, and The Irish Vagrants (1853–1854) by Walter Howell Deverell. A reliable and attentive witness to the “heroic” urban misery of nineteenth-century outcasts was Jean Jules Henri Geoffroy, whose beggars appear as the protagonists of his painting Les affamés (1886), almost like a page illustration from a novel by Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo. One might also recall the Finnish famine of 1866–1868 (known in Finnish as suuret nälkävuodet, “the years of great hunger”), caused by crop failure and endured by rural communities with a naïve fatalism as a sign of divine will. Even the academic court painter Robert Wilhelm Ekman could not remain indifferent to this tragedy.
Already in the distant year of 1986 I was struck by the large oil painting titled El Hambre (“Hunger”), recently created by the Expressionist artist from Quito Oswaldo Guayasamín, who sought to shake the conscience of viewers in the face of the adversities, deprivations, and social injustices of Latin America. Later, on Sunday, May 11, 2014, in Milan, I had the opportunity to see four works of art expressly created by the street artists Tomoko Nagao, Bros, Pao, and Felipe Cardeña for the event Hungry for Art. The aim was to raise public awareness about the longstanding problem of world hunger and to promote consciousness of balanced and responsible consumption of available food within the corpulent and jarring prosperity of the West. Moreover, I am familiar with the small minimalist drawing on paper stylized in 2024 by Marco Lodola, titled Fame invisibile (“Invisible Hunger”), in which the faceless protagonist lives by savoring the empty silence of the “weeping plate.” In this way the work invites reflection on the Christian value of charity and on the danger that it might become an obsolete anachronism rather than the expectation of an approaching spring.
Had he been able to know Yona and the powerful force of her artistic images, the Jewish atheist writer Paul Auster, a socially engaged postmodernist, might well have recalled such an encounter in his book The Art of Hunger (1982). Certainly Oscar Wilde attached great importance to food, so much so that he wrote, “I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them,” in (The Importance of Being Earnest). The same view would likely have been shared by the acute and refined philosopher Tullio Gregory, mindful of what the philosopher and theologian Ludwig Feuerbach wrote in 1850: “der Mensch ist, was er isst” (“man is what he eats”). In other words, within food lies the key for the proper understanding of the indelible human soul. Gregory would also have remembered what had already been emphasized in December 1825 by the aphorism of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin: “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es,” from (Physiologie du goût, ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante, 1826).
I must confess that I did not remain indifferent even in Padua in 2015 when I witnessed the provocative performance “Time to Time” by the Vicenza-born artist Marco Chiurato. The performance took place in the tunnel of the former Fornace, originally founded by Giulio Carotta in Via Siracusa, south of the Church of the Holy Family, a space now repurposed for social and artistic experimentation as the Fusion Art Center. There the artist consumed a lavish candlelit meal while facing a tragic multitude of life-size dark terracotta sculptures depicting malnourished, skeletal, spasmodic, or dying children. One might say, recalling a verse by the anguished poet Hugo Margenat, that they were victims of the “thorns of cosmic hunger.”
Nor can I forget the initiative of Sabine Delafon and her photographic artist multiples for the project Fame, launched in 2014. Starting from the cardboard signs held by homeless people on the streets bearing the words “I’m hungry” to ask for alms, she reproduced them in black and white on posters, prints, T-shirts, and ceramics. These were all sold for charitable purposes to support non-profit organizations such as Banco Alimentare and Equoevento.
I would gladly inform Delafon about the culture of Ancient Egypt, in which writing formed with hieroglyphs was considered a sacred language, so much so that the hieroglyphs themselves were called “the words of God” (medou neter). Yet the word medou (“word”) also meant “staff” or “stick,” precisely because hieroglyphs, like staffs, support human beings along the path of knowledge with the heart.
Abstinence from food or fasting, as counter-rhythmic deprivations of physiological and visceral mastery, touches the social organism more in the religious sphere than in the aesthetic one. Modern culture has rationally separated the two for the masses, who must not be disturbed by obstacles to the speculative productivity of capitalism, which by its nature is continuous and automated.
Studying imbalances and deprivations within the social body, the Brazilian sociologist of Lebanese origin Emir Saderconcluded:
“If a monkey accumulated more bananas than it could eat while most other monkeys died of hunger, scientists would study that monkey to find out what the hell was happening to it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.”
If innocent nostalgia truly allows the past to interfere with the present, then Friedrich Nietzsche once asked: “What is it that we feel nostalgia for when we behold Beauty?”
I conclude by sheathing the slow dart of fragile happiness that my critical reading of Yona Tukeser’s artistic work has set vibrating, and I leave you, readers, with this Indian maxim: “In happiness, no one remembers; in unhappiness, everyone remembers. If, in happiness, one remembered, what need would there be for unhappiness?”