BASIL ALKAZZI

.....Perhaps most startingly, Basil Alkazzi's focus on Christ's two hands and those of the twelve others holding the golden goblet of wine, and isolated in blackness-- in effect what mystics call "the dark night of the soul" the resolutely realistic Last Supper 1992....... stripping away, except all those who were present at it, so that we alone can witness it, zeroing in on the hands of each that hold the goblet from which He drinks the wine that He miraculously transforms into His blood, and which bless us despite the fact that we have betrayed Him, as Judas and Peter did. ......These works have their place in the tradition of mystical or transcendental abstraction inaugurated by Kandinsky.

Donald Kuspit- A Voyage of Dreams

I have tried to portray the personality, character, and the emotional feeling at that one very potent, magical and metaphysical given moment, throbbing with drama and suspense, where faith, love, compassion, understanding, tolerance, and betrayal, are all expressed and presented through the hands of the thirteen participants. It is for the viewer to decipher which pair of hands belongs to whom. That act then also becomes one of suspense and intrigue.  Basil Alkazzi 1992

Collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA