Portals and Commodities

Hi Elad, we’re meeting to talk about your third artist's book. I’m wondering that perhaps you don't think of the two previous print-objects you did as artist's books. What do you consider them to be? 

The current book is my first monograph. The truth is that it is difficult for me to define the previous two, they are very different from each other. The first is a zine called X Rated Oddities. The second is called Crack. It’s a very elegant by-the-book artist’s book, released in a very limited edition. It came out of an exercise I gave to students in a year-long course on the artist's book. I worked with an old catalog from the Tel Aviv Museum. I won't reveal which catalog in order to not offend anyone, but there certainly wasn’t any subtext about the choice, just a consideration about good raw material.

It was a surreal idea—to create a collage composed of strips placed side by side. The end of the process was related to mysticism, finding a slit or a crack in reality. At the time, I spoke with the curator Sarit Shapira, who described the making of art as a search for a world beyond normal perception. I was taken with the idea of our religious need for art, which has a material, consumer expression, alongside our spiritual need. One could say that this idea continued into the current book, called Portals and Commodities in English. Often the name only works in one language, but in this case the English name works for me too.

Your painting really contains these poles, on the one hand a very strong earthiness: body, nudity, consumer goods. On the other hand, dealing with faith, religious institutions, classical mythology versus modern myths. As someone who manages the Magazin III Jaffa bookstore, I can tell you that your fanzine really has a life of its own. People come looking for it. The edition of Crack is completely sold out.

Can you believe that I don’t have a copy of Crack? It’s funny-sad when you think about it. Do you have a copy?

Yes, there’s a reference copy.

I won't ask for it, it wouldn’t be polite.

That’s funny. It’s important for me to say that in my eyes you are a “painter’s painter.” In fact, just now while preparing the questions for the interview I realized that you are actually a multidisciplinary artist. Can you tell us about your decision to focus on painting, specifically in this book?

It is true that my "natural" skill is painting, but at a very early stage in my work I detached myself from the physical need to paint, and began to experience creation as a mental act. Once that happened, the medium didn't really matter much to me: I also made films and music. For a while I had a fantasy of being a filmmaker, and very quickly I realized that it was difficult for me to work with so many people. I see myself as a conceptual painter, and so there’s always a conflict between my desire to work physically and my need to think about the visual in other mediums. My painting is very much influenced by cinema and visual culture on all its levels.

The book is not a classic monograph. It is not arranged by years or series. How did you come up with how to edit it?

When I started editing the book, I realized that I wanted it to contain drawings from all my years of working. I discovered that there are works that I can stand behind 25 years later. At the end of the process I decided to focus on my works from 2008 to 2021. This is because until 2008 I lived in the Netherlands and did not paint much; I was busy with other practices. When I returned to Israel, I enrolled in the MFA program at Bezalel; I needed something to keep me disciplined. During my studies, I’d go to the studio every day, and a new period in my painting began from that, which the book tries to collate. To a large extent I feel like it succeeded. It’s like a period at the end of a long sentence.

I can say that the works are paintings for the advanced student, but the book is organized in a somewhat mainstream way, an attempt to speak to a wide audience. The editing thinks about painting in a contemporary "magazine" way, with somewhat crazy placements, which produce contrasts and a sense of mixing, which corresponds with the way we consume images today. The book is divided into three main chapters: “Crew Love Clan,” with a text by Sharon Kantor, “Portals and Commodities,” with a text by Ran Kasmy Ilan, and “False Attraction,” with by a text by Shaul Setter and another text by Ran. Each part has an organizing idea that is also present in the way the works are arranged, and there are two other sections that don’t have texts, but do have titles —“Ghosts Inn” and “The Devil Probably.” These are actually two formally distinct series, which I wanted to have their own place. Sort of a dimension within a dimension.

You have to be in the moment with the texts and the editing in order to notice the nuances and contexts between all the parts. Also there are instances where the layout of the text very much corresponds with magazine or Internet design.

Yes, it was important to me to avoid any kind of didacticism in the way in which the works and texts are placed next to each other. Generally, the first chapter refers more to a local tribal experience, familial to a great extent, and to specific places. The second chapter refers more to existential, universal questions. The third part focuses on a topic I dealt with a lot over the last decade called “false attraction.” The reference is to intra-medial questions, to the illusion of painting, to its attractiveness. This idea has a psychological, fantastic, and projective dimension. The work with the stale bread (False Attraction, 2010), for example, deals with this strategy that has been with me in my painting since childhood.

The last point you described relates to a passage that grabbed me. It’s a paragraph from Ran Kasmy Ilan’s text that articulates something about the “tone” of the book: “This is a generation born into the death throes of a socialist society and the birth of a new, neoliberal Middle East. A self-conscious middle generation, anxious about life, looking for the great social structure to which it is supposed to belong, even though it knows there is no such thing anymore. Everyone knows that the ship is leaking and that the captain lied, Leonard Cohen told us, but as far as we are concerned, even a broken promise is something to hold on to” (Self-Portrait with a Multiracial Person, p. 236).

Ran’s deciphering of the works as part of the generation in art I belong to is very relevant. A generation that grew up on the expectation of a better world, and at some point discovered that it was all a scam. The progressive thoughts crumbled, the fracture led to a different kind of searching. You can say that my dabbling with mysticism is related to the spiritual crisis that recasts every solid claim as an open question. This brings me back to the last series in the book, “The Devil Probably,” which deals with human tragedy and existential questions. This is a series that I released in a limited edition of a 20-print package, basically a kind of artist’s book. I researched German expressionism, woodcuts specifically, from 100 years ago.

Why did you decide to include this series even though it was already released as a distinct project?

Precisely because it is so different from the other drawings in the book. At 19, a very successful artist visited me in the studio, and told me that if I want to be successful as an artist, I would need to create a distinctive signature. She hinted to me not so subtly that the eclecticism of my work was problematic, and that I should produce an iconic style. I was very offended, but through her, I understood how difficult it was going to be, how art’s consumerism clings to the “template.” I've really encountered this throughout my career, and other people have said the same thing in different ways.

They didn't understand the code of my work. Another full-fledged painter said, for example, that I don't know how to draw hands. And who said that what I'm interested in is drawing hands “correctly”? That is why it was important to me that the book contains a variety of “experiences,” which go against the narrowing that is still required of painters, even today. You can say that the homogeneity of the book is conceptual.

Completely. It has homogeneity, yet it does not make your work "accessible." I think it's a great success. How did you choose the writers?

I thought about the writers with Ran, who also produced the book together with Dana Raz. The text by Sharon Kantor, who is a cultural researcher in her own right, really moved me. Ran's text is a sort of “about” me, which manages to get into my work without falling into the clichés of a biography. Ran refers to a specific painting in which I appear, which is a kind of key to reading the book, but we will keep it a secret so that people will want to see it and read it.

Another thing I want to point out that is not obvious, is that the works appear in the book regardless of their original size, and there are even works that are cut. It's really a bit of a shocker in terms of a monograph.

The logic of the close-up is inherent in my work, so I also have no problem cutting works if it’s right for the book’s layout. Of course, there are pluses and minuses to this choice. That's why we included an index at the end of each chapter in the book. You can zoom in and out. By the way, this is also something that painters like to do, to step back from and then get closer to the painting and ask "how did they do that?” So I am happy that this practice made it into the book as part of the editing logic.

How he made the hands…

Yes. Of course, you always have to remember that the book is a distancing from the painting itself.

Yes, but the reproductions are really good. I have to say that there’s a limit to how much one can explain this book; it needs to be leafed through. A bit like a scavenger hunt or watching a movie. Shaul Setter says that you are a “serial painter,” that your work is cumulative. It's interesting because after seeing these paintings next to each other, suddenly it’s hard to see them separately. For example, the painting of the motel with the candy kiosk alongside the painting of the terrorists. It feels like images accumulate in your head, and then they come out all at once in a painting. This book is an experience of one painting, multiplied and amplified.

I didn't think about that until now. This is a painting tactic that I of course did not invent. Since childhood, I’ve liked collecting references. I was educated on great artists who did similar things in a social sense: Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger, and Gerhard Richter.

So we’re touching on the social aspect of your work. In each of your paintings there is some “built-in insult,” but there is also always temptation and joking about social situations and structures. But actually it’s hard to laugh when leafing through the book. I thought of it as a “manual for aliens.” If Dr. Spock, to whom a chapter is dedicated, had arrived from outer space in the 2000s, he would have discovered in the book the sick evils of humanity: rotten food, terrorism, degrading treatment of women. Is it possible you released a “heavy” book? Maybe you don’t allow yourself any solace?

Look, heaviness is my existential experience... Sharon Kantor says in the book “the dark humor products of a dead culture.” I have a story about that. There is a painting whose reference is a poster of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It also has an image of a geographical map of Israel. One of the printers in the printing house where we worked on the book saved this page from one of the tests we did. When I asked about it, he said that he recognizes all the Palestinian martyrs in the picture except for one man, which is actually my self-portrait.

He asked, “Why did you put yourself on this painting?” I explained that it was like a movie poster: I put in a spaceship, the image of my face, bleeding from my head, and I added the pyramid from the Louvre. Chaos. But he is Palestinian, and he knew every person in the painting, which organization they belonged to and each one’s name. It’s an encounter with reality. There is no political position here, but rather an attempt to neutralize positions. Apropos the self-portrait that Ran refers to in the text, I feel that almost every painting is a type of self-portrait.

So dwelling for a moment on the personal and biographical, the book is dedicated to your grandmother, Gemma di Tivoli Sonnino. I find the dedications in books very poignant. Could you tell us a bit about her?

She was a painter, who did not realize her potential. She is 98 [years old] today. She returned to Israel after living in Rome for most of her life. My entire tendency to painting comes from her. She is at the end of her life's trajectory, and it was important for me to point that out. Pure love.

What’s the book’s soundtrack?

Great question. My musical taste is very eclectic, and I often name works after songs. I read in an interview that Haran Mendel said that while working in the studio we shared I was a musical dictator. I like that label. 

Making a book is like…

Making a movie.

What book should we add next to our bookshelf?

Ayelet Ben Dor’s graphic novel published this year: Brandy and the Psychedelic Mold.

Where can we get a copy of your book?

At Magazine III Jaffa Books, at the Herzliya Artists’ Residence, at Migdalor book store, and on my website.