Deborah N. Sessel is a representational painter, depicting, in painstaking detail, humble personal items left behind by Jews who suffered the Holocaust. Working in oil, she renders with care the silken folds of a delicate scarf, a silver Star of David on a chain, and the smooth silk of "Frieda's Purse." In "Tefillah," which is Hebrew for prayer, we see prayer book boxes, with black leather straps attached them and a stack of well-handled leather-bound prayer books, whose grain seems able to reveal itself to touch. In a graphite-on-paper piece called "Study of Emunah," a prayer shawl hangs upon barbed-wire -- neatly folded, crisp and clean, an effect which is accomplished by the precision and the tightness of the drawing. Spools of thread, needle, thimble and a Jewish star make up the arrangement in "A Day's Work." Sessel's own care in the rendering of these objects replicates the respect with which the owners must have treated both cherished possessions and objects of everyday use. Her landscapes contrast to the clarity and detail of her still lifes, depicting dim scenes, as evening falls and colors are muted, of anthropomorphized watchtowers, standing-in for those who manned them once. "Mincha," the afternoon prayer and title of one of the landscapes, is a time for calm and focusing on priorities in the midst of the day's trials. Although Sessel is too young to have experienced the Holocaust, her work shows an understanding of those who lived it -- or at least this seems so according to many people, some of them survivors, who have viewed her work. So then we ask, How is this possible?

Trained in trompe l'oeil, Sessel is an especially realistic artist, but her work is not trickery. It is a form of representation that bespeaks what I will call, after American Pragmatist philosopher C. S. Peirce, a "metaphysical realism," which offers an alternative to constructivist theories about our abilities to know and model reality.

For many decades now, representation has been viewed as an intractable "problem" by cultural, literary, and art theorists, who argue that whatever system of representation one chooses to model reality (objects, events) the choice of representation itself constructs the very thing that it claims to re-present. Our biological and cultural systems selectively determine what is meaningful and what is not: the rest we simply don't see. Hence, meaning derives from structure and the systematic relations between and among these signs of things, not the things themselves. In this view wherein visual language refers only to itself rather than to objects, language constructs our notions of reality. Such theories have led to a decline in the popularity of representational work in favor of abstract work that refers to the materiality of the representational system itself or to its conventions and assumptions and etc.

This view of representation is clearly inappropriate for Sessel's work, which insists, quite clearly, that meaning is more than strictly conventional and relative objectivity is possible to behold.

Fortunately, this post-modern constructivism has been influenced by a constrained constructivism that has evolved in tangent with the former and avoids the pitfalls of solipsism and idealism. While interpretation is constructive and fallible, it is constrained by brute reality, which we sense as external to ourselves and resistant to our will. With this view of representation in mind, one can appreciate the devotion Sessel pays to the objects she depicts. Unlike an abstract painter, she is constrained by the object, which resists her will to put it one way or the other. She looks at her drawing and sees error, and, in noting error -- the difference between how it first appeared to her and how it is -- she becomes aware of herself and of the object as the other. Her images are powerfully evocative without accompanying verbiage. The constraints to interpretation are reproduced in the visual language, where they should be. It is in these constraints (whether they be conventional or physical) that we share experience. Hence, I argue, the inherent failure of the nature of representation to represent absolutely, does not license or even invite pure self-reference.

Intricate detail calls for intense study, and with proper attention to the work itself, one sees that the exhibition's title, "Faith" does not necessarily refer to the dedication to a specific religious belief, or to a life hereafter, or even to the denial of or fear of imminent obliteration in death -- which are themes that one might assume pertain to people being held in death camps. The faith to which Sessel pays respect and homage is faith in life itself. No matter the suffering and degradation, the will to live remains powerfully insistent. This feeling is communicated by the way Sessel focuses on objects, the purse, the books, the thread -- all of which connect to life being lived, to continued existence and persistence and perseverance. On a very literal level, the work is not about what happened to these people after they lost possession of these objects. The work is clearly about how their lives went on in spite of what was about to happen. Sessel has noted that few instances of suicide are known to have occurred in the camps, and this belies a tenacious faith that life is worthwhile for its own sake. Those who, like Freud, imagine the death drive is a powerful force make an all too common logical error in supposing that the ultimate final state is the ultimate telos (likewise, those whose ideology makes death in martyrdom an ultimate solution to the problem of suffering are mired in an abstract logic that lacks existential grounding). While there is hope that the war will end, while there is a chance that your missing daughter yet lives and is in another camp somewhere, or that there is someone who waits with equal hope for you to be found, then morality requires you to cling to life. It is not an absolute moral position that makes this so, rather it is the conditions of life itself. If we have an obligation to defend all acts as acts in particular contexts, and artists who ground us in physical and esthetic realities perform the very important role of moral guides in helping us understand very complex feelings.

In closing, I would like to add a thought about originality and artistry of representational work, generally speaking and about Sessel's in particular. Representation is often associated with skill foremost, partly because the level of skill required for good work is obvious or easy to judge. The level of skill is not as immediately obvious in abstract art due to its very nature of being unconstrained by anything other than the nature of the medium itself. Constraints can, but do not always, make one follow predetermined paths. They can actually provide the very means by which originality arises. Creative acts are defined by their lawfulness as much as their novelty, and this is a fact too often missed. There must be a background of form against which departures can be recognized as such. In "Study of "Eretz Israel," for example, rents in a striped cloth (reminiscent of the work clothes worn in the camps) take the physical shape of the land of Israel. Without the title to guide interpretation (Eretz is Hebrew for "land"), the drawing will seem, to those unfamiliar with geography, to depict simply a tattered cloth. It is a measure of artistry to be able to naturalize, in this way, departures from reality. In many of the pieces in this exhibition, Sessel combines the cruel signs of imprisonment (e.g. barbed wire, work clothes) with objects of beauty and peaceful well-being. Thus, she states her theme pictorially with a clarity and literalness that could not be accomplished in words. The power of faith in life can bring beauty to any scene.

The "Faith" exhibition will include fives still-life drawings, five still-life paintings and five landscape paintings. Dactyl Foundation will be open Tuesday - Friday 10 - 6PM, Sunday 1 - 6PM during the exhibition. Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities is located at 64 Grand Street in SoHo, NYC. See www.dactyl.org for further information. Office: 212 696-7800 or Gallery (during exhibitions times only): 646 329-5398.