The Surface
Four Walls, Variations on an Urban Theme, group exhibition with Lena Zaidel, Boris Yuhvetz and Tenno Sooster,
curator: Lena Zaidel, November 2010, Agripas 12 Gallery, Jerusalem
The Scouts – Tribute to Kazimir Malevich, 12 units, 40X40 each, acrylic on canvas, 2010
The Spectators—an homage to Kazimir Malevich, placement composed of 12 squares, acrylic on canvas, 40X40 each, 2010
Oded Zaidel works with limitations. His paintings gradually shed graphic gestures, nuances, and complex images that appeared in his past works, for the sake of a pictorial and colorful, but slim and subdued, dictionary – a very basic collection of prefabricated forms that can be inserted each time for uniquely different purposes. Here, the circle is a head, there a flashlight, and elsewhere a moon.
Here the rectangle is a building, there a van, elsewhere a topographical image; while sometimes a square is a window, sometimes a frame, and sometimes just some form. It is a painting that seems like a promise of a painting – like a box containing a puzzle, on which is printed the picture that will be formed upon the correct assemblage of the pieces inside it.
A puzzle is also the association that rises to mind upon the contemplation of paintings in which the images that appear in them have been gathered from a variety of different and disjointed sources of inspiration – the American coastline, the Jerusalem urban scene, Russian constructivism, pure minimalism, industrial images, and amorphic geometric forms that have been transformed into human images adjacent to geometric forms that have been transformed into scenery.
Yonatan Amir
A foreigner who tries to analyze Jerusalem based on the group of exhibitions currently on display might come to the conclusion that the city’s most prominent characteristic is dialogue. Correspondences at Jaffa Gallery 23, Teachers and Friends at Barbour Gallery, and a group exhibition at Agrippa Gallery 12 – three collaborations in a city whose residents, Jews and Arabs, secular and religious, right-wing and left-wing, and rich and poor, are far from living in peace together. Therefore, it seems that it is not for nothing that the collaborations on display do not take place between locals themselves.
Neoclassical Tower of Babel
In “Variations on an Urban Theme” presented at “Agrippa 12″, participants include Lena Oded Seidel, Boris Yochabets
and Tano Souster – three immigrants from the USSR and one Sabar. They all present paintings of semi-imagined urban landscapes, and it is interesting that even the familiar places in the paintings are depicted with a strangeness that distances them from the familiar and charges them with a degree of mystery, dream, or dissolution.
Sowster, for example, presents a painting of the Tower of David, in which the place becomes a kind of neoclassical Tower of Babel, perhaps bursting out of the ground and perhaps collapsing into it. In another painting, the tower continues to be built until it seems that it will soon swallow the rest of the city’s buildings. Lena Seidel paints in neighborhoods around Jerusalem, but the use of a gold-colored base coat and the sight of pastel wolves invading the streets give the painted city a dark, apocalyptic medieval appearance, whose aura of holiness has been replaced over the years by a self-fulfilling prophecy of destruction. At first glance, Yochabetz’s paintings seem to be much more naive than those of the other participants in the exhibition, but the flatness of the painted scenes and the somewhat bizarre relationships between the characters turn naivety into suspicion and place question marks above each painting.
Alongside the three immigrants stands native-born Oded Zaydel, who paints, surprisingly, under the influence of Russian Suprematist painting. Thus, while the Russian artists pour their childhood memories and their familiarity with the history of European art into the landscapes of the country, he has made an effort to acquire a foreign language without leaving the borders of his home.
Yonatan Amir, from an article in Israel Today, November 10, 2010
The Surface
Curator: Yonatan Amir, May 2012, Agripas 12 Gallery, Jerusalem
If Oded´s paintings seem like a promise of a painting, the scenery that appears in it seems like a promise of scenery. It is advertisement-like scenery that reminds us of the graphic television images of the 1950´s. On the surface, the paintings look like the images of a mask. Like the stereotyped “happy housewife” from television, these too depict what looks like a preformed pattern. However, in contrast to the image of the happy housewife, Oded´s images are not trying to sweep real-life drama under the rug and present hermetic forms of perfection. Rather, and surprisingly, despite the dullness of the schematic images, softness and emotion shine through them. The industrial images are not impersonal, the fenced scenery is not threatening, and the prefabricated forms are not lacking in character. Thus, though we are talking about schematically based paintings, these paintings meet the schematic in its later form, when it is free of the utopian promises that it represented in the beginning of the 20th century, and from the need to conceal the opposing currents that rage beneath it that appeared half a century later. The release from declared ideologies and role-playing leave the paintings of Oded Zaidel “emotionally free,” and as such, they are inevitably filled with emotion.
Yonatan Amir, Curator
