Asphalt, Iron, Concrete

Ella Gallery, Yemin Moshe, Jerusalem, Februar 2008

curator: Ella Kalir-Ariel

Factory yards, construction sites, scrap metal yards, containers and trucks, sheet metal, pipes and planks. Oded Zaidel paints the backyard of the cityscape. Not natural landscapes or “civilized” city views but marginal zones, derelict corners and places we pass by almost without seeing them. The paintings are usually based on photographs he takes that serve him as a primary sketch. In the work process, the data in the photograph are taken apart and built anew—details in the landscape are blurred, some disappear, until sometimes only a loose connection remains between the painting and the photo that was used

 as its starting point.

All paintings are devoid of animals or humans. In this respect, one can see Oded’s paintings as a link that developed—in its unique way—from Italian Giorgio de Chirico’s formidable empty city paintings, as well as from American Hopper’s paintings of empty spaces that use a similar space distribution. It was Hopper who said, “An empty room was always a challenge for me… what an empty room looks like when there’s nobody in it… this absence can attest to presence”. There isno alienation in Zaidel’s paintings—the absent person is present, and the truck, the tractor or the crane, the guard booth and the light in the window are evidence of their existence and being about. In this respect one can go back fifty years, to Avraham Ofek’s paintings of agricultural machines in the kibbutz—always unmanned. The junk machine as a subject in some of the paintings, the treatment of the landscape as a random conglomeration of objects and the reliance on photographs, is reminiscent of Larry Abramson’s drawings of mounds.

The seemingly arbitrary, inane choice of subjects, makes the painting itself the subject and focuses the viewer on the language of the painting, the colorfulness, the structure, the division of space and the painting action. Oded’s paintings have warmth, solid ground and sky, daylight or lamplight at nights. Only that what we have on our hands is not a pastoral landscape but construction and industrial sites, the attraction of which lies in dynamism and surprise, just as in the artistic work itself. Using concise language and hearty daubs, he creates solid color planes. In the daytime paintings, the colors are illuminated, dazzling, and seen in all their might, so that one can feel the intensifying heat emanating from the exhaust pipes of the bulldozers and forklifts. In the nighttime paintings, the lights shine and create a dramatic appearance out of a building’s wall, door or window, while darkness covers the dust, the tired watchman inside, the waste and the tar-stained soil.