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naked ghosts

My father spoke to himself. I would hear him murmuring.  He would lock himself in the bathroom and utter words, his voice sounding desperate and furious.

 

I remember asking him when I was a little girl, “who are you speaking with, Dad?”  Slightly embarrassed by this exposure of his intimate ceremony, he would answer, “with a man” “what man, Dad?  “ a man with no hair.”  

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Many years later my father was artistically inspired by the textures he found on the walls, some of them were abstract, but one day he found a graffiti of a human silhouette and became obsessed with that image.

 

Had my father reencountered “the man with no hair” embedded on the wall of a street in Cordoba?

 

And who would that man be?

Polaroid taken in some street in Córdoba, Argentina.

Armando Markovitch work

Behind the window, Tempera.

43cm x 43cm · 1993

In contemplating these works, I think of my father’s father. . . an unknown, a man without a face and without a name. . . 

 

My grandmother became pregnant in 1936, and she never revealed the identity of the father. . . In those days, being an ”illegitimate” child entailed humiliation.  My grandmother was expelled from her family, and my father bore the marginalization and guilt on his shoulders:

 

Had this primary rejection, this segregation, been the source of his anger and self-destruction?

 

My father’s father was an unknown, is his ghost—mute and anonymous-- the one which appeared in my father’s works?

 

Another answer occurs to me: My father painted these works  in 1993. . . ten years after the assassination of a great number of Argentinian youth in the hands of the military dictatorship.

 

The “disappeared,” were, for many years, condemned to anonymity.  Not only were their bodies and lives destroyed, but even their names were “omitted” and their identities swiftly erased.

 

Ten years after the crime, Argentinian society seemed anxious to forget. . . Young people suffered a worse fate than being murdered, they were expelled from existence itself.  And everybody wanted to forget them as soon as possible! Forget them even before remembering!  Society seemed to want to erase once again, what had already been thoroughly denied!

 

Were those beings without burial and name, those beings thirsty for presence, the ones my father perceived in the silhouettes he painted?

 

Or maybe it was his own silhouette?  The silhouette of a painter who was ‘unknown to the world,” an artist who worked in a gas station, who had never exhibited his works. . . 

 

Or maybe the man in the wall is MAN (“Man with capital letters) . . . whose body dissolves into the background. MAN: imprisoned and painted on a wall, without face or body?

 

All or neither of these could be the answers. 

 

The ghosts in disguise that appeared in my father’s first mono-prints seem to have lost their garb, and now, in these works, they impudently flaunt the void.

 

…Maybe, what my father painted is simply that “man with no hair” who kept him company during his whole life, that angry man who spoke with him in secret.

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