Hofstatter’s expressive paintings are not easy to stomach. He strives to touch the impossible through an almost compulsive exploration of the human body and of various and curious bodily unions that are forever morphing, breaching boundaries of body and gender. In the encounters that he depicts, bodies penetrate one another, contain one another, or turn one another into something new that may be just as much masculine as feminine, or a man-animal chimera; a legless creature with breasts and a penis; or a figure with four arms, no sexual organs, and the face of a wolf. Within the realm of the painting, the depicted figures exist in a boundless existential condition – suffering terrible torments, or in a state of wild abandon. This boundlessness is also apparent in Hofstatter’s refusal to date most of his paintings – a consequence of his view of painting as something a-temporal, without end. In stark contrast to this chronological reticence, when it came to choosing a name for a work, Hofstatter went to great lengths to do so with the upmost linguistic precision, in one of the five languages that he spoke.
It is instructive to examine Hofstatter’s work through the concepts of psychoanalysis in general, and those of Jacques Lacan, in particular. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud describes a sexuality that precedes the differentiation between the sexes – one that he calls polymorphous perversity, a stage when the subject is still partly object, and the primal urge is centered on interaction with parts of his own body; a subject without head, language, or gender. In Hofstatter’s nightmarish and broken reality in the wake of the Holocaust, he appears to be trying to piece together man’s soul within his body or corpse. To this end, he turns to the unbounded and regressive condition of polymorphic perversity. Hofstatter’s experiences in the Holocaust, which defied all comprehension, led him to cross all boundaries of the Symbolic, including the boundaries of the body, to create an Eros in the Real. It is at the meeting point between the satisfaction demanded by the primal urge and the demands of reality, that jouissance is experienced- pleasure coupled with pain; a life-enabling digression that is part of the creative process or invention.

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