Lucy Is Sick

One of the most resonant sentences in The Book of Disquiet, the meandering and fragmented epos by Portuguese author and poet Fernando Pessoa, poetically declares that “there are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”1

This sentence came to my mind on a recent visit to “The Gaza War Tattoos / Lucy Is Sick”, multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and author Roee Rosen’s new exhibition that is presently on view at Hamidrasha Gallery - Hayarkon 19 (curator: Gilad Melzer). Throughout my visit at the exhibition—which is actually made up of two separate but corresponding bodies of work that are presented as two solo exhibitions that sprawl over the gallery’s two floors—I futilely tried to recall who was the author of that quote, which came up again and again as I observed Rosen’s pain-laden works. 

The disturbing attempt to remember started at the ground floor, where I encountered enlarged photographs, prints that were hung directly on the walls and portrayed various nude body parts that were documented in an invasive close-up angle. The photos are displayed like a substrate upon which Rosen spread out the tattoos he made. The thought about pain was only reasonable facing these tattooed skins, despite the fact that one can only assume that these were make-believe tattoos, stencils created for the photographs and reminiscent of stickers used by children, simulacra of the real pain. Only instead of featuring flowers and butterflies,  Rosen’s drawings belong to the harrowing world that has become our reality in Israel over the past year: Rising flames, clouds of smoke billowing up a female arm, the “Total Victory” military catchphrase that has become a tragic joke imprinted onto a bare back, a contracted bicep carrying the words “Safe Zone” like an empty promise. 

If you are bent on looking at gentle butterflies fluttering their wings you can still find them on the second floor, where Rosen is showing a huge, colorful, 25-meter-long mural designed by the artist Oryan Yakobi (under his guidance) and colored by students and graduates of Hamidrasha - Faculty of the Arts at Beit Berl College, where Rosen teaches art. But even while facing the pseudo-naive mural and the 51 drawings in black and white of which it is made up and which are framed and hung on top of it, I couldn’t escape the pain: A little boy bursting into bitter tears that stream from his eyes like immense waterfalls; butterflies that swarm together to make up memento mori skulls; body parts that were torn off, dragged about, legs hanging in the air upside-down, tumbling down a flight of traitorous stairs.

Only the next day, while reading the artist’s new book, Lucy Is Sick, which was published in December 2024 by Pardes Publishing, did I suddenly recall the name of the author of the sentence that haunted me. Thus far, it may seem as though I’m sharing a rather private and insignificant thought (an act that Rosen himself would probably recoil from, if I am to go by his comments about his dislike for autobiographical writing, which appear in his autobiographical book. Rosen himself refers to this amusing paradox in his book extensively, even juggling with it in a manner upon which I will expound later on in this essay).

Nevertheless, I find that this memory, flickering in me like a lightbulb that suddenly came to life, isn’t just a matter of my unquiet mind going off track during its encounter with Rosen’s artworks. I might even go so far as to say that this sentence I recollected could be another key to reading Rosen’s both visual and literary work.

A rhizomatic one-man show

The Book of Disquiet is a thick volume, the unedited life project of Pessoa that was first published by his friends in 1982, only after the author died. Pessoa himself dubbed the book “a factless autobiography,” and credited it to one Bernando Soares, a Kafkaesque character of a lonely and restless clerk who spends most of his life daydreaming. Soares is one of the 75 additional pen names Pessoa used in his lifetime. He himself didn’t use the term pen name, known in the literary jargon as “pseudonym,” and instead coined the term “heteronym”: A fictional character created by an author in order to write in a different genre or voice. According to Pessoa, a heteronym differs from a pseudonym because it isn’t just a fictitious name under which a writer can publish his work; a heteronym represents a whole other character whose looks, biography and writing style are completely distinguished from his own.

The book includes Pessoa’s thoughts, starting in 1912, when he predicted the outbreak of World War I at 24 years old and develops into journal entries and daily descriptions of Soares’s routine as a junior assistant to a bookkeeper in Lisbon. The main theme that unites the hundreds of non-linear threads that make up this book is the notion that it is almost impossible to express the sound our inner lives make when they clash with reality. 

Having remembered the author and his multiple identities, the comparison between Pessoa and Rosen became inevitable—even before taking into account Rosen’s deep dive into the chronicles of the private pain he experienced in recent years when he contracted multiple myeloma (a type of bone cancer). Rosen draws the outlines of these chronicles in his book Lucy Is Sick, both through the drawings that accompany the text and appear in his exhibition, and by providing detailed accounts of the disease spreading in his body: The initial and wrong diagnosis, how he coped with the second correct and terrifying diagnosis, the period of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant procedure he underwent, and finally—recovery. 

Much like Pessoa, Rosen, too, retreats into his inner life. For the artist, the introspective private life expands exponentially and directly in relation to his physical reality shrinking more and more as it is disturbed by illness. He describes this process in paragraphs dedicated to his time in forced isolation at the hospital that brought about a deep yearning to paint, to recall a beloved poem by William Blake, to remember the grace of childhood and transport it to the present day: “The key used to lock the door was a priceless treasure. It was good to be alone. The room was the world… you wished to narrow yourself down to the very surface of the table, the underside of the carpet, the pages between the book bindings. One could always become even smaller.”2

It seems that Rosen, one of Israel’s most veteran and celebrated artists both here and overseas, doesn’t need an official presentation. Nonetheless, in case some of our readers don't know, much like Pessoa, this artist doesn’t make do with his own identity. His art, which is just as performative as it is visual, literary and intellectual, can be thought of as a rhizomatic one man show. Throughout his decades of work he has created multiple fictitious characters under whose name he penned books and for whom he created cross-genre bodies of work that include paintings, drawings, video works and sound. Among his most memorable projects is “Justine Frank,” a provocative and fictive Belgian artist who lived between 1900-1943, was affiliated with the Surrealists, immigrated to Israel and then disappeared mysteriously. In addition to Frank, Rosen also made up art historian Anne Casthorpe who revisits the life and work of the forgotten artist, and the artist Roee Rosen, a contemporary Israeli creator influenced by Frank. Rosen showcased retrospective exhibitions of Frank’s work at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (2001) and at Extra-City, Antwerp (2009), the birthplace of Frank. He also wrote the book “Sweet Sweat,” a pornographic novel that Frank allegedly penned, in addition to writing her biography and a semi-academic essay on her work.

Later on, Rosen presented the solo exhibition Vladimir’s Night (2013) at Rosenfeld Gallery in Tel Aviv. The exhibition was based on a fictional artistic persona: Author and illustrator Maxim Komar-Myshkin, who immigrated to Israel in the early 2000s and founded the avant-garde group “The Buried Alive.” Komar-Myshkin suffered from paranoia and believed that Vladimir Putin sought to assassinate him. According to this tale, Komar-Myshkin committed suicide in 2011 and after his death it was discovered that he secretly created his own revenge against the Russian leader: The album Vladimir’s Night, where Putin prepares for his night sleep after having dinner at his summer house, when suddenly dozens of objects become animated, join him in his bed, torture him and eventually murder him. Rosen showed the full album at the exhibition alongside panels of text. The full book was published in English by Sternberg Press in 2014; it has yet to be translated into Hebrew.

Then there are also the real-life characters Rosen used in his work, rewriting their life stories or providing a new interpretation to their tales. It’s hard to forget Live and Die as Eva Braun, Rosen’s sensational solo exhibition from 1997 that was presented at the Israel Museum, where he took visitors on a virtual and textual tour inside the body of Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler’s lover. In 2022, Rosen turned to literary hero Kafka when he created the film Kafka for Kids, an experimental video that gives Kafka’s renowned short story, The Metamorphosis, a theatrical and operatic interpretation and asks about the meaning of childhood by exploring the childhood of Palestinians growing up under the Israeli military occupation.

"The story you tell yourself about persevering against the illness"

Unlike his previous works, and particularly his literary pieces, here the artist turns to his own life story, which took a surprising and bitter twist five years ago, just when it seemed that he had reached a peak in his artistic career after having presented a retrospective solo show at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2016), participated at Documenta in Kassel (2017) and showed an exhibition at the Pompidou Museum in Paris (2018).

In his current literary and visual project, the descriptions of the illness, the rate at which it spread in his body and the harsh symptoms he experienced are interwoven with philosophical segments in which he criticizes other authors’ and filmmakers’ approach to portraying pain. Among others, he critiques the film Love Story (1970), which he describes as “the first cancer hit… one can see it as an archetype for a pain-free representation of the illness,” or Babyteeth (2020), which Rosen writes of as a case study for the way in which “the terrifying and rare look… is desensitized in order to enable one more fantasy of a pleasure stronger than everything that came before.”3

Rosen also examines critical theory, analyzing works such as the canonic essay “Illness as Metaphor.”  The treatise by American writer and cultural critic Susan Sontag, which was first published in 1978, criticizes the way our contemporary culture uses language to blame the patients for bringing about their own illnesses Rosen argues that “pain is missing… from Sontag’s book: Illness as Metaphor is an almost entirely pain-free essay. This avoidance is a double-faced characteristic of the book, and it is both a weakness and a strength.”

A similar accusation to the one Rosen directs at Sontag cannot be pointed at the artist. Rosen knows that there are no ships sailing toward where life is not painful. He exposes his chemotherapy-poisoned guts in a kind of prosaic style that is so honest that at times it evokes wonder, at others embarrassment, empathy or deep sorrow, and other times seems to trigger all of these feelings at once. The majority of his paragraphs begin like cold and official documentary entries (“these are the circumstances of the first bout of crying over the disease, my birthday, age 56, ten days after the diagnosis”) and develop into harrowingly direct confessions (“you berate yourself for crying, as if you were your own child who went astray. Why is the crying so unwanted? Is it because the crying wastes energy that ought to be preserved? Or does the crying disturb the positive story you tell yourself about persevering against the illness?”).4

Rosen’s insights about how social anxiety over pain is reflected in contemporary artworks that falsely portray illnesses in a romantic or sterile fashion are accurate. But these insights are not the reason his book is so resonant. To paraphrase Rosen himself, I’d say that these intellectual analyses are the double-faced characteristic of his book, whose strength actually lies in the prosaic and everyday descriptions of his personal pain. Together, these descriptions amass into an honest self-portrait, one in which Rosen bravely looks head on at his fears and the fears of those around him, whose world is shaken when he is diagnosed and throughout the period of his illness.

People who haven’t gone through the exhausting experience of accompanying a loved one through a bout of terminal sickness can be exposed through Rosen’s writing to the workings of the mind of a sick person who believes he might soon have to separate from this world. Those who did suffer themselves from sickness or accompanied their loved ones through such a trial (like this writer who recently watched her own father grapple with violent cancer) may find themselves fighting back tears upon reading lines such as “Ada, the youngest daughter of Orna and Lucy, was then six years old… she imitated the cumbersome and pained walking ceremonies, but she didn’t intend to make anyone laugh nor was she pretending. She embraced the signs of suffering as one embraces the non-verbal subtleties of language: The tone of voice, the posture and the ticks, the music of the breath, the coughs and the sighs… Ada may have been excluded from learning concerning facts as children are excluded in such cases, but her body skipped over what she was told and held a direct dialogue with the illness. Lucy observed this performance and tried to refrain from thinking that she would remain fatherless.”

First person, third person, in sickness and in health

In his drawings, his installation, and in his writing, Rosen seems to employ the same tactic—bringing us close only to push us away and vice versa, ad infinitum.6 He invites visitors to the exhibition to gather around low-standing tables that have been positioned in the center of the room, where piles of white papers adorned by the same drawings that appear on the walls await. Visitors can color in the drawings as they please, bring them to life and seemingly take an active part in the artist’s creation, as did the students who carried out his instructions to create the mural.

Yet upon reading his book, one learns that one is indeed invited to partake in Rosen’s work, but the author is far from removed and he has precise suggestions for how the pages ought to be colored, including remarks on colors and undertones. The coloring pages, it should be noted, are numbered. There is an intentional order to the recurring appearance of the images on the walls (although it is not immediately clear, at least until the eyes grow accustomed to the visual and colorful abundance it meets). Rosen leaves us with a sort of index, arranged proposals, a visual map presenting the territory of his own dream world, much like his book acts as an attempt to map out the disease, the failing of the body and its pains, as well as the possibility to go on living with these pains.

In the gallery space he exposes his simple and supposedly unsophisticated painterly dialect, even though the true meaning of the images he creates doesn’t meet the eye upon first glance and is only revealed when Rosen explains it in his book. Thus, for example, a naive and surrealistic image of a large bear floating in a room filled with windows that reveal a view of the moon and the stars, turns out to belong in an associative dream Rosen had while sick. This dream is one of many dreams and visions that are not sweet at all but rather almost tragic: “My body escaped my body. One Lucy remained captivated in his chair, while the other got up, naked and barefoot, and escaped from home without anyone noticing. The free body knew that its time was limited. It only had a few minutes. So he escaped to the nearby fields, ran as fast as he could, taking pleasure in the gust of wind formed by his own movement… then my body turned around and got back down the same path, hurrying to go back home in time (according to the Cinderella-like logic of the delusion), without anyone present noticing what transpired, back to the handicapped shell in which it lived.”7

Even the crying boy who reappears in Rosen’s drawing isn’t merely a sad child the artist dreamed up (albeit one reminiscent of the little prince, the protagonist of another children’s story that is actually far more suitable for adults). He represents the bucket rider, the protagonist of Kafka’s short story of the same name that was originally published in 1917. The plot of this story is only secondary to Rosen’s text, who uses it to tell us that “often Kafka started work on his longer texts while using the first person, only to transition later to the third person. But in ‘The Bucket Rider,’ as in other short stories of his, Kafka retains the viewpoint of the protagonist.”8

Rosen isn’t embarking on a brief literary lecture just for kicks; he seems to try to explain to us why in this book (and perhaps in his entire body of work), much like Kafka, he feels the necessity to flit between first person and third person, reveal a small fraction only to hide a larger one, say the truth about health turned into sickness but place this truth in the mouth of another character. In another ars-poetic tribute, Rosen shares that while sick, he read the third part of Kafka’s biography written by Reiner Stach. “Toward the end of the book, toward the end of life, there appears an episode of crying,” he recalls.9 “Kafka, committed to a sanatorium, bursts into uncontrollable tears when witnessing the medical staff’s abuse of an old and poor peasant… when the dying Kafka weeps, he cries for the other, but perhaps also for himself through the other.”

In this way, Rosen leaves us, his readers, a thick hint: The crying boy in the drawing is the bucket rider who didn’t receive coal and was forced to fly alone into the icy depths of forgetfulness; the rider is actually a reflection of its author, the crying Kafka; Kafka is used as a metaphor that helps Roee Rosen cry over the possibility of his death; when Rosen weeps his words onto the page he might be weeping for all of us, who may never see a ship sailing toward a place where life is not painful.

"To write is to forget" 

Thus, Rosen moves between lament and hope, between his inability to go down the stairs, write or teach and his deep passion to return to his creation, between writing in the first person to writing in the name of Lucy, the protagonist of his book. At times Lucy is the main speaker, and at others a decided and revelatory “I” comes through. Often, the first and third person appear one after another on the same page.

Why “Lucy,” of all names and identities? In the later parts of the book Rosen describes his deep interest in martyrs, the tortured and sacred men and women who according to the Christian faith preferred death over conversion. In particular, he writes of his interest in the character of the martyr Lucy. As aforementioned (see footnote 6), Rosen has a long-standing interest in martyrs and in their visual and cultural representations. The portrait of Lucy, whose name he burrows in this book, was first painted by him already back in 1991.

In Christian culture, Lucy is considered to be the patron of the blind. The meaning of her Latin name is “clear,” “radiant” or “understable.” According to Christian mythology, she was persecuted and tortured to death by Roman emperor Diocletian around 304 AD. In paintings from the Gothic and Renaissance periods, Lucy is depicted carrying a golden tray upon which a pair of blue eyes defiantly look at the viewer. Some say her eyes were gouged during the tortures she suffered; according to other myths, she gouged out her own eyes when the emperor sent her to a brothel, where she was supposed to be punished by getting defiled.

So Rosen the painter, who needs his eyes to see clearly the inner and outer images he draws, finds himself identifying during his illness with a blind martyr. Is this identification strange? Not necessarily; one can easily conjure well-known characters that were blinded as punishment or out of shame (like Oedipus) or in order to think more clearly and reach enlightenment (for example, 17th-century British poet John Milton, who wrote the poem “On His Blindness” that grapples with the notion of faith while losing one’s eyesight). Then there are characters whose blindness takes place in order to teach us something about the relationship between words and imagery. Such is the blindness of Shylock in the work The Blind Merchant (1989-1991), an oeuvre in which Rosen rewrote the play The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare and described the plot from the perspective of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender. In The Blind Merchant, the story actually begins with Shylock’s eyes getting gouged out, in a move that sets the whole plot in motion.

On the other hand, Rosen seems to hint, we have our internal vision. If we dedicate our whole lives to it as artists or merely as spiritual beings, it might become stronger in times of crisis and allow us to see new images.

At the end of the book, Lucy-Roee reaches the stage of cautious recovery, the one termed in Western medical jargon “remission.” He may have completed his metamorphosis from a sick man to a healthy one, as he notes by using the word that marks his ongoing correspondence with Kafka, but from now on he must follow the changes of the body—both the visible ones and the ones that are hidden from sight. The illness doesn’t disappear, it only retreats, and Rosen must now face the fear familiar to anyone who has gotten ill and recovered or accompanied a loved one through illness: The fear that the wheel will spin backwards, that the metamorphosis will be disturbed and that the cancer will return. While pondering endings, he tries to recall the final words of a poem that appears in poet Anne Sexton’s rendition of the Brothers Grimm’s tales. Rosen translated this rendition in his youth and illustrated it, but now he is panicked to discover that he can’t find the lines of the poem he believes he recalls. Eventually he discovers that “the poem ends in a way that had nothing to do with the poem I thought I remembered.”10

When I read this anecdote, again I was reminded of Pessoa, who remarked that “to write is to forget” while also claiming that “no nostalgia is more painful than the nostalgia for things that never existed.”11 Rosen’s book ends with the clear understanding that unlike children’s books, in real-life stories there is no good ending but only an assortment of endings that in their turn open the door to new beginnings, which are also bound to become endings. Or in the artist’s own words: “Large parts of this book are a testimony to the forgetting of fateful things, painful or difficult and especially scary things, the forgetting of people who leave marks, the forgetting of medical procedures, the forgetting of explanations of what is happening and what might still happen.”12

Epilogue

When I finished reading the book I remembered that a moment before leaving the gallery, I climbed back up to the second floor and stood in front of the coloring pages that were taken from Rosen’s book, drawings that visitors colored in with pencils and have now been stapled to a corkboard with pins. My gaze wandered and stopped over two drawings that had been hung side by side. On one of them, using a pastel-colored pencil, a visitor scrawled: “S. P. P. was here” (don’t take me for my word; the signature, the kind one normally finds written on bathroom stall doors, may have been made up by a different order of letters. My apologies to the visitor who authored it).

I don’t know Rosen personally, but I assume that if he were to see this scrawl he would laugh heartily. It seems that this simple autograph expresses an ancient and deeply human desire, one that has survived wars and illnesses through millennia of civilization, a kind of desire that makes artists like Rosen create, the desire that makes us all write autobiographies, biographies, art reviews: To fight against forgetfulness by creating, to be anchored by language in order to be remembered and to remember. 

Footnotes

1. In The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. The full edition was published by Serpent’s Tail in London, 1991 and reprinted in 2010. ↑
2. Author’s translation; the quote appears originally in Hebrew in pages 198-199 of Lucy Is Sick, ed. Vered Zinger, Pardes Publishing, 2024. All quotes from Rosen’s book featured in this essay were translated by the author. ↑
3. Rosen, 153-154, 158. ↑
4. Ibid, 139-140. ↑
5. Ibid, 89. ↑
6. Here the author wishes to explain that by using the word “tactic,” she doesn’t mean the word in its manipulative and negative connotation. Rather, I am referring to conversion, change and transformation as Rosen’s main artistic means of expression. Much like Renaissance painters used to sneak their portraits into their paintings, so does Rosen change identities and gender, makes up characters and inserts his own biography into their life stories (for example: Justine Frank’s painted portraits are composed of a mix of Rosen’s own visage and that of his life partner. Another example is his series of drawings of martyrs from the '90s, which he presented at the Herzliya Museum of Art in 2012 at the exhibition Cabinets of Wonder in Contemporary Art). ↑
7. Rosen, 106. ↑
8. Ibid, 126. ↑
9. Ibid, 132. ↑
10. Ibid, 253. ↑
11. Author’s translation from The Book of Disquiet. ↑
12. Rosen, 226. ↑

Joy Bernard (b. 1996) is a multidisciplinary artist, dancer, journalist, and art and dance critic who lives and works in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Her journalistic and literary writing is published in many newspapers and magazines, including the literature magazine "Granta", the newspaper "Haaretz", Portfolio magazine, The Jerusalem Post, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, Collectors Agenda, and more. Joy frequently collaborates with other artists as a performer and dramaturge. She teaches writing, dance improvisation, and performance.