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  RAFFAEL
  LOMAS

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Screw.	Both noun and verb. A mechanical device with numerous literal and symbolic meanings.
Screw.	An object in the shape of a spiral or cylinder, usually conical with a pointed head. Continuous curves designed for insertion by rotating.
Screw.	Implications for one’s sanity. Connection to insanity—or at least eccentricity. Having a loose screw. All screwed up. Screwball. Screwy.
Screw.	Sexual connotations. To have intercourse. Twist and writhe. Penetrate. Get screwed. Screw me.
	And aggression: Screw you!
Screw.	To unite. To fasten the pieces together.

Jerusalem 1995 - At the studio

Jerusalem 1996 “Hospitalization at Ezrat Nashim Mental Hospital”

Ramat Raziel, Israel 1997 Preparation for the ceremony “When the Part is Larger than the Whole”

Neve Yam, Israel 1998 “Escape from the Yanco-Dada Museum at Eyn Hod”

Judea Mountain Springs, 1998 “Floating”

Jerusalem 1998 “Terra Sancta”

Haifa-Ancona, 1998 In the belly of the ship

Firenze 1999 At the Duomo

Firenze 2000 “Dante”

Dachau 2000 “Concentration Camp Memorial”

Lausanne 2000 “Art Brut Collection”

Auvers-sur-Oise 2000 At the Grave of Vincent Van Gogh

New York 2001

Varanassi, India 2002 The Ganges River

Himalaya, India 2002 “ Peaks”

"The Eye" - New York 2001 – 2002

All of these meanings are present in the gigantic screw that artist Raffael Lomas created seven years ago. A screw born out of depression. A 10-foot phallic screw made to compensate for the potency he had unwittingly surrendered to mental illness A screw that reaches higher and higher, touching the sky, seeking its perfect fit. The screw with curved, feminine swirls that twist and turn in its dance for survival. The floating screw that returns to the comfort of the womb.

Lomas’ screw is made of styrofoam covered with fiberglass and multiple layers of paint. It has a greenish gold luster. It is a beautiful object, rhythmically elegant and awe-inspiring. Though a screw is meant to advance through a medium as it rotates, Lomas discovered that his screw turns in the opposite direction, divesting itself of its functionality. Lomas claims, “If it could move, it would screw itself out of being a screw.” In fact, the screw’s rotation is endless, not unlike the machinations of the psychic structure it is meant to symbolize.

The link between creativity and pathology is not new. For Lomas, the screw is a life saving device. It is a found/created object that quite literally saved his life. It is his tie to the maternal, the sexual, the phallic, and the mad. The screw also represents the creative process. It is his baby: the creative product. Thanks to the screw, Lomas was able to undergo a metamorphosis from mental patient to creative artist.

Today Raffael Lomas, a man with no formal art training, lives as a full-time artist, traveler, wandering Jew, and engaging raconteur. His tale goes something like this:

Lomas’ life came apart seven years ago. He had been a very successful nursery school teacher living and working in Jerusalem when he succumbed to debilitating depression that climaxed in his desire to take his life. Although his attempt at suicide failed, Lomas was in need of special care and was committed to a psychiatric facility where he remained for over one year. He became friendly with his fellow patients and made an ironic discovery: despite the fact that they were in a so-called mad house, they all seemed to harbor deep-seated fears of going mad. After giving it some thought, they decided together that if they were to go mad, they could find no better place than a mad house to do it in. Thus, Lomas, along with 4 other patients, set a date for their common journey into madness. They ate and slept well, mindful that going mad might demand a significant amount of energy. The following morning, the friends convened at the breakfast table as planned, prepared to go mad. To their dismay, none of them had an inkling as to what this journey entailed. And they all left the meeting place dejected and disappointed for having lost what they perceived to be a golden opportunity.

Lomas describes how he wandered into the hospital courtyard on his own when he happened upon a pile of rusty screws. He picked one up and carefully observed the imprint it made as he pressed it to the palm of his hand. Something clicked in Lomas’ mind after finding the screw and his depression transformed into manic obsession with his newly found object. He decided to take the screw into the hospital ward with him. “Is this my missing screw?” he questioned doctors, nurses and patients. Not entirely content with the screws he found, Lomas became determined, as if on a mission, to create his very own screw. He received permission to leave the hospital for hours at a time on a daily basis during which he visited a sculptor friend, Lance Hunter, who permitted Lomas to use his studio. It took him 6 months to complete the screw. When it was finished, Lomas had the screw transported to the hospital and planned a ceremony for its arrival and unveiling. In addition, he assumed responsibility for assessing which of his acquaintances, like himself, had a loose screw and, during the ceremony, distributed the screws he had painstakingly matched with their prospective proprietors.

It is ironic that as Lomas increasingly confronted his demons and delved into the core of his being at the risk of true madness; others, who observed his renewed vitality and productivity, began to consider him cured. In fact, he was emotionally and physically exhausted and not yet prepared to face the world. He adamantly fought for the right to be mad and to convert that madness into creativity by embarking on a legal battle to remain in the hospital until he felt ready for discharge. Upon discharge, Lomas knew that his journey to health consisted in living a creative life. He also knew that his screw had yet to accompany him on a voyage marking his metamorphosis. In his words, “The walls of the mental hospital came down and the world opened up. Perhaps the world is one big mental hospital.”

The initial stopover in Lomas’ journey was a hen house on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was there that he and his screw established their first home. Adding a café and some avant-garde art and dance performances, Lomas’ hen house turned into a place with a cult following. Some believed he was onto something and wished to share his secret. Alas, neighbors objected to what they considered inappropriate use of a henhouse and attempted to have Lomas evacuated. Though he argued that perhaps he too was a hen since, as an artist, he laid a golden egg now and then; authorities remained unconvinced. The next stage of the journey was launched. It is perhaps no coincidence that Lomas’ screw has a deeply engraved cross on its underbelly. Like the wandering Jew who, according to popular legend, was condemned to roam the earth until Judgment Day; Lomas’ screw became both his emancipation and the cross he dutifully bore.

Lomas arrived in Italy with very little money, his car, and his screw in tow. He found a patron, Julio Barofaldi, who admired his work and his mission and offered initial support. Lomas remained in Florence for two years, all the while creating sculptures and paintings. After Florence, Lomas traveled to Paris, Lausanne, Dachau, and the United States. Each stop possessed symbolic significance for him, and several were timed to take place on September 21st, the anniversary of his suicide attempt. In Paris, he sought out the gravesite of Vincent Van Gogh, the painter who, more than anyone else, is as reknowned for fitting the popular mythology of the mad artist as he is for his remarkable paintings. Lomas wished to demonstrate that the road connecting creativity and madness moved in two opposing directions: whereas Van Gogh went from being an artist to being a madman; Lomas went from being a madman to being an artist. Lomas made a pilgrimage to Lausanne, home of the famed Art Brut Collection. As a man with a psychiatric past and one who lacks formal art education, Lomas felt a profound affinity to these, mostly psychotic, artists.

One stop that held particular personal meaning for Lomas was Dachau, the concentration camp his father had been interred in during World War II. Lomas’ father was the only member of his family to have survived the Holocaust. His paternal grandfather, after whom he is named, was killed in Dachau. A legacy of life and death began at birth for Lomas whose voyage has had him repeatedly confront and master the most challenging internal and external life forces, proving again and again that, like his father, he too is a survivor.

Since his stay in the hospital seven years prior, Lomas dreamed of transporting his screw to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. On September 21, 2001, he did exactly that. Lomas made a bold statement by having his screw face the front door of the museum known for its architectural indoor spiral: he forced an encounter between the product of a mental institution and an institution representing the art establishment.

Following the World Trade Center Disaster of September 11th , it was an especially troublesome time for New York City. When he set himself up outside the Guggenheim with his written Manifesto, Lomas invited passersby to place their fingers in paint and fingerprint the screw’s body. His screw became a public site and a collaborative work that now sought to cure New York’s newly acquired wounds as it had begun to heal his own.

In the meantime, Lomas’ work has been rapidly gaining international recognition and representation. His pieces have been acquired by the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art and the Arturo Schwartz collection in Israel, and Fatoria Laloga and the collection of Senora Pacci in Florence. They have also been represented in the Istanbul Biennele, 2001.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men…
In 1925, T.S. Eliot wrote a poem about the “hollow men” who live in “the twilight kingdom.” The metaphor of hollow men is one that appealed to Lomas who had never read Eliot’s poem. After leaving the hospital, he too wrote about hollow men as an allusion for the identity crisis he had experienced. At the same time that Lomas described himself as having been devoid of feeling and thought, he created numerous sculptures using containers, seeking to both represent the void and fill it at one and the same time. Shiny silver milk cans grow wheels and sprout flowers and dingy suitcases are pierced by metal, each a container for a condition resembling that encountered in Eliot’s “dead land” where the end of the world is felt to be near. Seeking nurturance from an empty vessel and vitality from a dead object, Lomas sought to resuscitate what had died in him. Like Eliot, he questioned: “Where will it all end? What will the future bring?”

Lomas’ near-perfect screw, the sterile object whose dimensions were carefully planned and executed perhaps compensated for the disorganized state of madness he found himself in at the time he created it. It is interesting that after leaving the hospital, Lomas no longer felt the need to create works with such precision. Instead, he became a professional bricoleur, a user up of discarded things that he turned into art objects. Whether this was related to a philosophical attitude meant to overturn ideas of utility, meaning and circumstance in art, or whether it was a result of living the life of a romantic, alienated, poor nomadic artist who had to scavenge for material, is inconsequential. Lomas’ use of “found objects” to make his sculptures places his work in the tradition of American assemblage artists like Raushenberg, Nevelson, and Kienholz. These artists demonstrate the manner in which art and life are inseparable as they carry on the struggle of the anti-art Dadaists to free themselves from all preconceptions and pretensions of the art movement.

Lomas’ obsession with the spiral pattern in his screw turned into a preoccupation with the circular form evident in his recent sculptures. The Wheel Series is an assortment of pieces that are constructed from wheels of different sizes that have been dismantled and rearranged, painted, or covered with leather and strings. They are both raw and graceful in their play with the dialectic between movement and stillness, inner and outer realities. Their motion in stasis is not unlike the challenge Lomas has repeatedly had to face on his voyage: creating a fixed object while continuously on the move.

Lomas’ wheels recall Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-mades”, in particular his Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Bottle Rack (1914). Yet, unlike the absurdist attitude toward life conveyed in Duchamp’s art, Lomas sees profound spiritual significance in the paradoxical relationship between movement and stillness, center and periphery, the rhythm of life and the wheel of fate that can land one in a concentration camp, a mental institution, or around the world on a spiritual quest. Whereas the art of both Duchamp and Lomas is preoccupied with revealing human unrest, one can imagine hearing Duchamp say that art is a clever trick, while Lomas would say it has something to do with transcendence. His wheels appear to make time and movement stand still, akin to Jung’s mandala symbol, in their effort to reunify the self. Those with string often bear a resemblance to spider webs, entanglements of what might represent the inner workings of the mind, meandering patterns revealing the process of psychic growth.

Many of Lomas’ most recent wheel sculptures look like eyes. Curved, straight and jagged spokes rotate around a domineering center, usually painted a bright green or blue (against the evil eye?). As the gateway to his soul, Lomas’ eye sculptures draw us to his inner self-dialogue. Our gaze is co-opted and we assume the role of mirror to validate the very existence of his eye (I). We look at the eye that gazes back at us, creating a to and fro movement between mirror and mirrored, and between eyes that are actively piercing and those that are passively receptive.

Some of Lomas’ sculptures are purposely made to float on water. The sculpture’s form is then doubled by its reflection, which becomes an inseparable element of the whole configuration. Reflections, eyes, mirrors, and the gaze all indicate that Lomas’ voyage ventures into the internal world as well as around the world.

Many of Lomas’ paintings employ a drip technique that pays homage to Jackson Pollock, the alienated, self-destructive American hero. They convey a sense of the accidental as well as the deliberate, and although the paintings are abstract, they are not absent of meaning: they attempt to resolve the conflict between chaos and harmony. Lomas pursues his fascination with spirals and wheels by painting on circular canvases. His paintings appear to offset depressive forces by celebrating life and pulsating with the rhythm of color and movement.

Lomas’ sculptural sensibility reveals itself in his use of the canvas as an object whose function far exceeds that of a passive recipient for paint. Once again, he does away with conventions like easel painting in his creation of colorful and abstract objects that are far more than paintings. One includes three canvases; another shows the reverse sides of two. Some are tied together with rope, becoming collages in three dimensions. Canvases are part of the total gestalt, a dance of color and form. The tension Lomas creates between canvas and paint invites viewers to enter the process of creativity as well as react to its final product.

Raffael Lomas is a singular man whose ingenuity and courage demonstrate how the path to art is one that, like his totemic screw, coils about with unforeseen twists and turns. It is no coincidence that both the artist’s paintings and his sculptures can be viewed from a variety of perspectives. Lomas believes that just as there is no one way to live a creative life, there is no one way to observe art.

In the final analysis, Lomas’ screw is a hotbed of paradox representing both self and other, inside and outside, masculine and feminine. It is an extension of the artist’s self and symbolizes his strength as well as his vulnerability. It is his father and mother, even his lover, with whom he has gone on an extended honeymoon. It is a transitional object, one that soothes and comforts him while helping to negotiate between internal and external realities. Lomas speaks of his screw as if it were his baby, and tends to its tears and wounds. Yet, it is the child he knows he must release for both of their sakes. After he leaves the United States, Lomas plans one additional stop on his voyage. He intends to travel to India and free his screw to its own fate in the Ganges River.

The screw has united Lomas with the past. Yet, its spiral conveys progress and growth through its forceful impression of gesture as well as creative vision. Since it embodies an ever-evolving movement of energy forward directed toward the future, Lomas’ screw obliged him to literally generate a positive spin on life. As spectators, we come away from the encounter with Lomas and his art with a deepened appreciation for the transformative power creativity posseses for the artist as well as ourselves.