JAMES E YOUNG Karen Gunderson's Black Portraits of Rescue

How does an artist commemorate the heroic rescue of Jews by the Danes and Bulgarians during the Holocaust without obscuring the much more pervasive darkness of evil that made this rescue necessary?  How do we commemorate such heroism without assigning it a singularity of motive and purpose?  To what extent are the individuals portrayed in this gallery of rescuers representative of their compatriots’ actions during the Holocaust?  And to what extent are they necessarily the exceptions who prove the rule of bystanders’ indifference and complicity?

Karen Gunderson does not answer these questions so much as she brilliantly articulates them in her stunning assemblage of black-on-black and charcoal portraits, meticulously wrought meditations on the goodness of a few whose scant light pierces, but does not dissolve, the darkness of this time.   These are not celebratory portraits of larger-than-life heroes and heroines, blinded by their bright goodness, so much as they are human-scaled images of people who did what they could, even as they remain haunted by the knowledge that this may not have been enough.

I remember how taken aback I was the first time I saw Karen Gunderson’s “black paintings” several years ago.  She had been highly regarded for her lighter-than-air skyscapes of puffy white clouds in translucent blue skies, paintings that seemed magically¾if paradoxically¾to capture the ephemerality of the clouds, their constant movements and changing shapes, in the fixed medium of paint.  Suddenly, however, all lightness was put to flight and replaced by thickly-applied black paint.  But then I realized that through her brush strokes and the stippling of her brush work, the artist had actually created haunting images in the reflective surfaces of her black paint:  a butterfly, a king’s crown, a candle, a six pointed star.  Luminousness here emanated not from within the depths of the paint but literally from the artist’s stroke itself, which caught available light and seemed to imbed it into its surface.