Night Butterfl

Night Butterfl / Adi Assis

A new and surprising element appears in artist and poet Oded Zaidel’s new painting
series, the butterfly. A butterfly that exponentially exceeds its natural dimensions, wings
spread, staring outwards, set against the backdrop of a gloomy industrial landscape.
Industrial buildings and their surroundings, such as cranes, containers, walls etc. were
a central part of Zaidel’s early works, where human beings and animals were absent. So
where, and why, has the butterfly emerged in his current paintings and why is it so large?
Why are its wings staring outwards?
The answer to the first question has to do with the butterfly’s attendance on site.
Attendance is a charged word in the industrial environment, as it calls to mind the time
clock, which circumscribes a significant part of the production worker’s day, marking
the hours the worker is supposed to devote to the Sisyphean manufacture of the product
they are charged with making. By contrast, the butterfly’s attendance is not subject
to the timeclock’s command; its presence is not functional, it is not there to engage in
manufacture. Its presence is happenstance, temporary, and with a high degree of certainty
goes unnoticed. What is the chance a butterfly might be discerned among industrial
buildings, within the incessant metallic hullabaloo of manufacture? That is why the artist
surprises us with an oversized butterfly in the painting’s foreground, with the industrial
surroundings serving as its background.
The butterfly, almost as big as the industrial buildings, the empty chair and the
streetlight, is part of the industrial landscape. Its wings bear a message of change, of
transformation. It seems the industrial environs have been deserted, and nature has
returned, in the form of a butterfly, to the place where industry had driven it away. Since
this is a still life work, the butterfly is a painted object, and it would be accurate to say
that now art is encroaching on the factory. In the paintings where the butterfly appears,
Zaidel summons viewers to make room again for art in their lives. If the butterfly, which
represents art, can serve as a counterweight to factory walls or cranes, then even in
the lives of the viewer who works as an accountant, the unending quotidian excel files
overflowing with numbers, can transform with a bit of imagination into a patch of fiel
buzzing with fireflies on a late spring night.
The answer to the second question — why the butterfly’s wing has a pair of eyes glancing
outwards — can be analyzed through the glance itself. It is an indirect glance, which avoids
eye contact with the viewer, turning instead to the gallery space. While the viewer explores
the butterfly and the industrial buildings in the backdrop, the eyes on the butterfly’
wings examine the goings on in the viewer’s background, other pictures in the exhibition,
and the viewers observing them. These reciprocal glances chart the gallery space with
perspective points, intensifying the sense of congestion in the paintings: The factory and
its surroundings appear intertwined, almost a single unit. This sensation closes in on the
viewer, just as the factory walls close in on the worker.
The viewpoint is also a central component in Zaidel’s painting method. Instead of taking
a few steps back and painting us the big picture, the painter opts to bring us a different
viewpoint in each painting. Each painting shows several elements from the big picture.
For example, there is a painting that contains a butterfly, lamp, chair, and container;