Grief for his mother, killed by the occupying fascists, constantly returns Boris Lurie to

that last morning and that day when she disappeared together with his other relatives.

That day, December 8, 1941, when he woke up before four o’clock in the morning and

was propelled by something out in the street, fell on a Monday. He furtively made his

way through the deep snow drifts toward the barbed wire. From there, he could see

the house in which his mother, his sister Zhanna, and his grandmother had spent several days before being “evacuated”. It was snowing. He could hear the cries of a guard or a policeman. A roll call was in progress. Ill-defined shadows were shifting from side to side to keep themselves warm in the freezing cold while waiting for a transport to arrive. His relatives were not among these people. Roland Barthes dedicated his book Camera Lucida to the photographs of his late mother.

In one of them, her image is barely discernible. In others, he does not recognize

her face and not one of the prints satisfies him, inasmuch as, as he writes, they only

displace his memory of the features of the beloved person.

The disembodied nature of painting allows the artist and the viewer endless projections and interpretations. The gaze and consciousness of the viewer does not become attached to insignificant and unimportant details and here, through the gaze and the hand of the artist, the viewer is transported into his joy or grief, into the sphere of that which is imaginary. In painting that welcomes mistakes and coincidences, a leap into any expanse is possible. In this instance, that expanse is the space of memory.

For Lurie, photography is the realm of dreaming, depicting the ephemeral object in an indefinite moment in time, and symbolizes the passivity of the object before the subject, whose presence before the camera reveals his own impotence.

In its turn, the painting manifests reality and the artistic representation of that same

person transports the object of a photograph into the active realm of the transcendent, the subjective, that which does not lend itself to scientific verification or historical certitude. That is why the photograph, an extension of the vanished reality, is incapable of resurrecting it. However, painting is a universal means of resurrecting the here and now, that is, it exists at any random moment in time.

Paying tribute to his mother, Lurie, who in his artwork is forever oscillating between

painting and photography, utilizing both the one and the other by blending them into a collage, settled on a hand-rendered drawing of her. But seeking a portraitlike

verisimilitude in her portrait is a useless undertaking; having been transformed into

the object of a painting, she attains eternity.