Is it too late to echo a cry, one that emerges from the walls of the 5th Arrondissement Town Hall in Paris, where until February 2nd, the dark yet illuminative works of Isaac Celnikier are displayed?

A Polish Jew and a Holocaust survivor, he never ceased to capture the annihilation he endured. In his engravings, the dense multiplication of crosshatches and scratches transforms into an inky fog (“Nacht und Nebel”), through which shadows and ghosts pass, their features barely discernible, destined to fade. Faces, where individuality might cling, are rare but all the more poignant; they scatter in clusters, collide under the blows of the engraving tool that redoubles the force of the lash, or stretch through a rare beam of light, reaching out to us with the final glimmer of a gaze.

The residual presence of life, still seething with astonishing vitality in these magmas and chaotic tangles of piled bodies, recalls the highest achievements of engraving: Rembrandt, Goya (“The Disasters of War”), Picasso… Isaac must have invoked these masters to fortify his resolve to testify regardless. To counter the forces of death—still present in the survivor’s memory, fragmented and stammering—with the resources of a relentless art, as scathing as it is hallucinatory. Celnikier makes us touch the nightmare; he takes us to the deepest circles of this inferno. Yet, it is not solely distressing: we marvel and reflect before these engravings wrested from the night, recognizing the force of a return—a return from the camps, a return to the horror that is here documented, dissected, held at an appropriate distance, and thus, transcended. How to resist collapse? Rarely has the mystery of resilience and the catharsis inherent in great art been as evident to me as before this exhibition.

For there is, conversely, on the ground floor, another offering, all of light and fragile gentleness, in the large portraits the artist made of his wife, Anne, and other familiar faces: images so serene of a return to life, to home. That word, "home," resonates with warmth, its peaceful fire glowing in the embers that emerge here from the flame of a fabric or the flush of a cheek where blood pulses. The woman, bathed in a muted aura—neither triumphant nor exuberant, but seeming to emanate from the thickly layered paint—appears generally solemn, with a gravid gravity evocative of creation. Anne slips into the role of the Madonna, but without religious overtones overshadowing the portrait: the iconography is only hinted at in these echoes of Madonnas with children. Life flows and circulates through these postures, their features meditative and fleshy, yet seemingly absorbed in an inner gaze. A dialogue unfolds between visible surfaces and everything they contain and conceal from us.

Isaac Celnikier has an acute sense of revelations, and this is why his art feels so profound: in the proliferating chaos of engravings attempting to suggest the slaughterhouse of the camps, as well as in the exquisite portraits of women embedded (again Rembrandt-like) in chiaroscuro, the gazes insist and meet ours. We cannot look away or refuse to imprint, one after the other, both this horror and this gentleness within ourselves.