Fifi

Ed Paschke, Fifi, 1973, Oil on Canvas

Ed Paschke’s Fifi jumps out at you among all other paintings surrounding it. Surveying the exhibit, a large two-tone room with grey floors and white walls, one’s eye stops with Fifi, which instantly sparks an instinctual curiosity within the viewer. Upon closer examination, something becomes unsettling about the individual featured as the main subject of the painting. The figure’s appearance and proportions do not fit with any pre-established schema for how a person, man or woman, should look, and this sets in motion a number of questions.

The physical features of the figure are clearly male. There is a large angular face, broad shoulders, toned muscular arms, and large lattisimus dorsi muscles. The shape of the arms in relation to the torso is unsettling. The elbows are irregularly long and the arms are bent in unrealistic ways. The placement of the hands, with the fingers pointing out, suggests that the side of the torso facing us is actually the individual’s back, and that the head has been turned 180 degrees around, along with what seems to be the front of the vest he is wearing. Paschke’s method of letting us know that all is not what it seems is most likely linked to the movie The Exorcist which came out the same year of the painting’s completion, 1973. The most popular scene of the movie showed a girl possessed by a demon turning her head completely around. The scene is one of the most disturbing of the film, and portrays the protagonist at the height of her violent possession.

One might wonder how Paschke’s Fifi could relate to the image of a possessed girl in regards to the meaning of the word. Fifi’s expression of ecstasy seems at first to covey a very different feeling than that of the possessed girl. Fifi’s facial expression is comforting and pleasing, but it is only when one steps back from the work with fresh eyes that one realizes that the painting has much of the same effect as the scene from...