The Family

1. The Family

2. The Family

3. The Family The Family is a painting that I have dedicated to the memory of the perished members of my family. An explanation of this work would be beyond the limit of my present time, so let me go on with the outline of my biography. During most of my last four decades, I have been indeed a wandering Jew. I have lived and worked in Tel Aviv, Paris, Rome, and Lausanne, and I presently reside in the US, in Boston. I have become a man who is at home everywhere and nowhere, an artist whose real roots are in the ground of his art. As I said earlier, and it may sound trite, I know that what I have been painting comes from a compulsive need to give meaning to the miraculous fact of my survival. It tries to appease a sad sense of bewilderment. It comes from the fear that in a world of unparalleled upheavals, things are never what they seem. My work reveals a reality observed through the eyes of a child who had suddenly aged. Some might call it elaboration of Trauma; I hope that my art is more than that.. 

4. The recently published monograph on my art, which covers over fifty years of painting, has this image on its jacket. If I had to define my art's language or style, I would situate it in a realm of allegory and metaphor.. Close Up

5. Devastated landscapes of ancient cities and urban constructions seem to have been made of a child's building blocks.

6. Figures are half-alive and half-contrived of bizarre prostheses. Abused angels stand helpless.

7. Chess pieces are involved in games without rules

8. A revolution has wiped out kings, knights and bishops. It has installed an equality of imperfections

9. THE FRUIT OF KNOWLEDGE "As a child, I had a feeling that if Adam gave up Paradise in order to taste the fruit that would give knowledge and a capacity to distinguish between good and evil, it must have been a pear. I felt that an apple, which in my childhood memories was usually something very sour, had nothing in common with the sensual, wonderful taste of a pear" The pear thus stands as an alternative symbol of the Fall of Man and all of its ramifications: the expulsion from Paradise into the world of time, the origin of free will, and the capacity to distinguish and choose between good and evil”.

10. Huge fruit, mostly pears in various stages of reinvention, pears made of stone, pears in the form of hovering planets, pears giving birth to other pears represent a shattered and bewildering world, a universe that offers no explanations. At times one can see in many of these paintings the traces of a human effort to repair.

11. Enactment

13. Banishment

14. The ghetto. Here is an inclined surface with no horizon and no possibility of escape. Indeed, when we were thrown into the ghetto like human garbage, it felt like being in a deep hole. This hole is in the shape of the Star of David, the emblem of the ghetto. Near it lies our badge of identification.

15. The texture of the painting tries to evoke the stony indifference of the outer world. After the liberation, when I revisited the ghetto, it stood in ruins similar to the ones in the painting

16. Here the title is "Alone." It is another structure in the form of a Jewish star, an island surrounded by a menacing sea. The painting's sky sheds an ominous light.