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Today, a prodigious talent to the point of being able to deceive the human mind with the realism of his work, that tricks people into thinking they’re staring at photographic images while it actually is oil works of unbelievable precision, with details so amazing to the point of being able to show the flow of warm blood in the veins through the skin, the age spots on the hands and wrinkles of the face of someone who has lived a life sadly and dignifiedly intense.
The portraits represented by David are not portraits of common characters, they are characters that share their history as survivors of the horrors of the Holocaust, from which they have so much to tell. Stories of survivors of the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its allies against Jews above all, but also of all those people deemed “not suitable” for various reasons: political, social or human. Every surviving person has their own devastating experience behind them but in spite of everything they have positivity without rancor for what they have lost.
It is estimated that between 1933 and 1945 there were about 15-17 million victims of the Holocaust and between these 5-6 million were Jews. The idea of painting these humans was born a few years ago, when, while teaching in a workshop in Tel Aviv and a man told me of the experience of a relative, and of how she survived the Holocaust, arousing curiosity and attention from David, who immediately wanted to meet and paint her. The woman has not consented to be portrayed but in David the idea of painting survivors has more than ever materialize above all when a collector asked David to paint his mother in law as a commission, she was a Survivor of the Shoah.
Besides this fact, another correlation that led him to such painting subject was a man named Murray who in 1917 emigrated to the United States, escaping the ethnic cleansing of the Cossacks on the border between Ukraine and Romania. Murray Kassan was David’s grandfather and his story of survival has now become a blurry legend in his family. He died when he was very young without ever having the chance to meet him and his survival story is now only one fragment of memories.
Painting for David is also a way of understanding the world around him, it’s a way to connect to people with the “excuse” of interacting and learning. This project is his personal way of connecting to the lost history of his grandfather along with the story of all the survivors who he listens to and records in his paintings and who make him feel closer to his grandfather: “My brush paints a bond between us” says David.
David Kassan’s painting captures humanity in its true form that is not only given by pictorial representation of the subject to be represented, but it is nourished by the dialogue between David and the persons who is talking of their life. The expressions let out through memory offer David precious moments to be fixed on the canvas because, in addition to representing these people, he talks with them in order to know them better, catching through the shades of expressiveness in their eyes, their face, their pain and the hope that accompanies them.
In summary David Kassan becomes the medium between the subject and the viewer in a sort of introspection from which David manages to get all the humanity that comes out and then fixes it on canvas with his amazing technical skills, and with the intent to control the oil painting medium so as not to interfere with the viewer’s vision.
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, he now lives between Albuquerque (New Mexico) and Brooklyn with his partner Shana Levenson, also a painter with exceptional gifts. He is currently represented by the Gallery Henoch, in New York.
He received a BFA (Bachelor in Fine Arts) at Syracuse University College in New York in 1999, learning from the masters of realism including Harvey Dinnerstein and Burton Silverman and then studied at the National Academy School of Fine Art from 2001 – 2007 and always in these years at the Art Students League in New York and then continue at the British Institute of Florence in 2003.
His first job was designing for designer projects, using abstractions and fantastic compositions that had nothing to do with the information that had to be presented, but the experience served him and he learned to make design subordinate to information and to have sites more balanced between information and design.
Despite the indisputable talent Kassan always tries to improve himself and to test himself with more and more important and complex paintings. In January 2017 he traveled with Chloe Lee, with whom they formed The Edut Project for capturing and telling stories of the Holocaust survivors through the paintings of Kassan, as well as written profiles and short films. They traveled from New York to Los Angeles to meet eleven Auschwitz survivors so he could bring the then current series of paintings of the survivors of the Holocaust at a later level as the number of war survivors, both those who lived through the war, and those who suffered in its most terrible expressions, are now reduced to a few hundreds of thousands people and that number is reduced every day. David Kassan’s idea is a life-size representation of all eleven survivors of Auschwitz about 18 feet wide and 8 feet high. The painting is not a commissioned work and as a result there is no guarantee of its sale, only the guarantee of a strong social impact. The scale, the complexity and the meaning of this painting make it a piece of art that cannot be ignored. Once completed, there will be a painting and a film that will instruct and be a source of inspiration. Currently the project proceeds with funding from the USC Fisher Museum of Art and the USC Shoah Foundation, as well as an exhibition scheduled for the September of 2019 at the Fisher Museum because the stories of the Holocaust survivors, their suffering and the lives they lived deserve to be told.
Technically the works of David Kassan combine figurative subjects with abstract background textures inspired by great artists like Franz Kline and Robert Rauschenberg, the background is rigid with the typography that breaks against the roundness of the figure and against its size, usually life-size because he wants it to occupy the same space of the viewer, so that it seems more real, more present:Hic et nunc. (is a latinism and it means here and now)He usually paints live but it can happen, given the age of the subjects, that he has to work from photographs if his subjects are not able to pose for a long time.
The works of David Kassan are as he defines them “a middle ground between the poem and the novel” because they talk about survivors who escaped just in time or sheltered by courageous people, now recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, who hid them in turn risking their very own lives. But they are in fact people who have suffered atrocious pain seeing their loved ones getting deported.
Selected for various group exhibitions, he also had many solos and won the coveted award The William Draper Grand Prize and People’s Choice Award at the Atlanta Conference by the Portrait Society of America at the end of April 2017 with the work “Amore e Resilienza, Portrait of Louise and Lazar Farkas, Survivors of the Shoah”.
The most important project, however, will be the one at the USC Fisher Museum in 2019 with The Resilience Exhibition- Painting of Survival, in collaboration with Steven Spielberg, former producer of Schindler List in 1995.
His loyal and profound approach, but at the same time fresh in the representation of the Shoah, puts stories of human atrocity next to stories of hope and will see it exhibit on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the USC The Institute for Visual History and Education in California and 80th anniversary of the USC Fisher Museum.
Among the various characters represented are: Goldofksy, Ross and the twins Roslyn Goldofksy and Bella Sztul. The purpose of the exhibition is to make known the stories of Holocaust survivors, their suffering and their lives because they deserve to be told. Remembering all countries to counter not only anti-Semitism, but all forms of intolerance, and these intimate images of the Holocaust teach us how to protect, promote and defend human rights in today’s world.
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