Art can be a confounding thing, and the general scene loosely lobbed under the broad category of 'Modern Art' is often enraging and mystifying. A lot of it can seem like so much hype, noise, and fraud. We think of Duchamp's toilet bowl, Jeff Koons' basketballs, Burden's infamous "Garçon!" cream pitcher, or even Barnett Newman's large canvases painted a single solid color, and it's very easy to get the feeling that we're being had. (I suspect this very feeling is what turns many otherwise interested people off of Modern Art.) In my opinion, a big drawback is that art of this sort is too 'now', too easily identified with this time, this place, this age. It's, therefore, refreshing to come across work that can't be pinned down in such a manner, that's completely indifferent to the present; work that deals in types or archetypes. The creations of the Armenian-born, Los Angeles-based painter and sculptor Emil Kazaz seem, to me, to be just that. Indeed, in studying Kazaz' art (either his paintings or sculptures) it's impossible to say if it was created in 2007 or 1607; there are no social, historical, or epochal references of any kind. Everything is pulled out of the eternal, the atemporal—what Carl Jung termed 'the collective unconscious'.

Joseph L. Henderson, in the "Ancient Myths and Modern Man" chapter of Jung's anthology, Man and His Symbols, identifies several kinds of myths which have repeatedly surfaced in civilizations and cultures throughout time, and, arguably, the most primal and universal of these is The Myth of the Hero. It should be kept in mind that this myth is only one of the Eternal Symbols, and that a lot of Kazaz' work takes up many of the others. (Further uncovering of this would be a most worthy project for the serious student.)

The 1995 Kazaz sculpture "Judith" references the familiar (deuterocanonical) Biblical account of the beautiful Jewish widow Judith holding the severed head of Holofernes.

This scene has been depicted a number of times in Western art; among the most notable examples are paintings by Allori, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Klimt and—perhaps the most famous of all—Artemisia Gentileschi. To make a long story quite short, in hero myths, the hero kills the monster. In the Book of Judith, Holofernes is a general in the army that has landed Judith and her countrymen in captivity. She seduces Holofernes (in promise only), gains his confidence, is admitted to his tent, gets him sloshing drunk, and cuts off his head, causing the occupying army to flee. It goes without saying that Judith is the hero, Holofernes the monster. Henderson writes:

I don't propose, here, to give any type of detailed critical analysis of Kazaz' works. Rather, I offer my humble interpretation of their meanings, and I invite readers to compare well-known portrayals of this Biblical story by other great artists with Kazaz' sculpture, in order to arrive at a sense of how different artists achieve different perspective. Here are some examples:

Emil Kazaz was awarded the prestigious Grande Lorenzo il Magnifico (Medici) Prize in Sculpture at the 2007 Florence Biennale.