Skizza Gallery Jerusalem

In a far far away Kingdom...

Jerusalem House of Quality, Derech Hebron 12

Their works are in demand, and they are not merely sold out. The happy patrons want to stay in touch with the artists, they write them letters, and look for the critique about them. The artists and patrons, though living in different hemispheres, on different continents, communicate via Internet; the artists sell their works and mail the parcels, and then receive moving letters with photos of their pictures hanging on the walls of apartments and homes in the UK and Holland, the USA and Australia…
The secret of these artists’ success is similar to the overwhelming success of the genre of fantasy. The triumph of these contemporary fairy tales can be attributed to the fact that they provide a refuge from the callous technogenic civilization, and open the door to the harmonious world where mythological personages live side by side with human beings and are as organic as the laws of Nature. The world of fantasy originated as a parallel one to our everyday life. Thus came into being Middle-earth of J. R. R. Tolkien, Narnia of Clive Staples Lewis, Earthsea of Ursula Le Guin… It seems that in our down-to-earth age only a fairy tale can tell us about the good, which gains the upper hand over evil, without any painful compromises and concessions.
Thus the literature of the late 20th – early 21st centuries came back to the fairy tale, to the creation of New Worlds, to the quest for the integrity of the human existence. And readers reward the authors’ labors hundredfold. Or spectators, as in our case. Indeed, the main point of the works presented in this catalogue is of the same nature – the creation of the Secondary Worlds.
Eleonora Brodsky is a professional book designer, and her series “An Apple Tree” at first sight looks like book graphics. Indeed, an apple tree is a personage of many Russian fairy tales. But if to take another glance at these works, you can see the entire world, with the Tree of Life amidst it. And then, spontaneously, a sequence of folkloric, mythological, fantastic associations comes into your mind. Here is the cosmic tree, the foundation of the world, and Mother Nature, a fruit-bearing tree, and the allegory of the stream of life. All these works were intended for the decoration of the artist children’s nurseries, and we almost feel the warmth of this world, which is plain and unpretentious only at first sight.
In Lena Kotlyarker’s magic garden, blades of grass and flowers are interwoven with birds, which look like fishes, and fishes, which look like birds. When you enter her pictures, you not only walk through her garden, but also take part in the mystery of potion-making: here a bit of cinnamon and honey, there some magic incantations, and a pinch of cadmium, and also one or two drops of ultramarine… Her pictures are saturated with the symbols of various faiths and creeds: keys, butterflies, fishes, eyes… while Hebrew letters (the artist interweaves the words of blessings, though almost illegible, into her pictures) send us from paganism to Cabbala. Lena grew up and studied in Ukraine, and so she follows the masters of the famous Petrick painting, who used to combine real flora of their surroundings with flowers of their fantasy in one bizarre pattern. In her paintings Lena also mingles various ingredients of her new Levant reality: orchids, red threads against the evil eye, hamsa, a Middle-Eastern symbol used in amulets, charms and jewelry, a kind of "protecting hand" or "hand of God", as well as the eternal symbols of Judaism…
Irena Aizen used all her assiduity and zeal, while creating her unique world of hares, and only then she painted the hare portrait gallery. In many cultures a hare is a god of Moon; for some nations, it is a symbol of fertility, lust, and life cycles; sometimes it symbolizes the death and sacrifice. Probably, due to such ambiguity of symbols, every portrait in her gallery is full of life and very contradictory. Only Irena knows, which of her personages is male, and which is female, who is wicked and who is in a good mood, since she is knowledgeable about their inner world. And as for their outer world, it is densely inhabited: you can find there mermaids (though some of them are not “maids”), and purring cats, and damans, the best hares’ friends. This world possesses all essential features characteristic of a fairy tale: History, Geography, Traditions; it lacks only Time.
Malka Tzintziper created her parallel Jewish world, which is full of love and real Jewish happiness. It is always warm here, and you are never short of interlocutors, since all the inhabitants of her world are Jews, and every Jew is talkative: cats, fishes, birds, goats. They speak as Jews do: with their hands, their noses, their eyes… You сan find here fairies, whose magic is far from being black (and indeed, why it should be black, if everything is bright?), and exalted lovers, and utilitarian kleizmers. This world is full of music: you can hear flutes and invisible cicadas on summer days and starry orchestras at nights.
Galina Didur paints beautiful women and handsome men, without a single flaw or blemish, soaring in thick and spicy Mediterranean air. Their life is as mythical, as the life in the land of hares. Their world is a play: they play chess, they play guitar, they sing songs… They are far away from us, with the effortlessness of their lives, and they keep going away from us, to the illusive world of languishing Levant, of green palms, warm sea, and small balconies.
The majority of the artists presented in this catalogue are women, and it is neither by a sheer chance, nor by coincidence do women prevail among fantasy authors. The point is that women are able to redesign the worlds. The fairy tale is her natural environment; she is a born story-teller and a custodian of legends and traditions. Women comprehend the world through their emotions, while men do it through their actions. Women choose to perceive the good, while men, by their nature, are evil-fighters. A man is always a fighter, be he a weary warrior or a king absorbed in his thoughts…
Harry Yukhvetz creates his specific Reflected world. He is a creator, though the creation has already begun its independent life (which is, by the way, not such a rare case). This world becomes unpredictable and produces its own collisions and difficulties. The only way to rule over it is to become its King and Warrior. In this World, the inhabitants are fighting the eternal battle (like in our world), though their battle is more comprehensible and noble; there is a never-ending dialogue between the rulers, and even if there is a lull in the fighting, nonetheless the evil reminds about its existence through the personifications of the Lower World – fishes, lizards, chameleons. Fortunately, the local Evil is mute. It is a very quiet world, after all: its rulers are speechless, as well as its Queen; we do not hear the clang of the battle either, since we see it in the crystal ball. Any sound seems to be stifled – probably because the artist has created this world as a sanctuary – for himself, in the first place.
Live trees are the austere, though positive personages in books by Tolkien and Lewis. I am not sure that when Evgeny Vasyutin was painting his trees, such associations came to his mind. The artist says, “These dry trees are symbols of dreams, which never came true, while the masks are worn for the sake of reconciliation with the reality.” His trees, with their virtuously done intricate plastic, and mute faces-masks, which are either hanging on dry branches, or became the visages of these trees, create the world, which inspires the involuntary fear. However, the grin of the great mystificator, Salvador Dalн, smoothes our fright. This is the manifestation of male judgment, both harsh and ironical.
One may assert that the creation of new worlds calls for some kind of a common language – like, for example, the medieval symbolism employed by the majority of fantasy authors. Nonetheless, the artists are able to manage with different styles. Some of them refer to Renaissance landscapes and official portraits (like Irina Izen), some prefer Constructivism and Monumentalism (like Galina Didur), some go back to folk painting (like Lena Kotlyarker), and some maintain the traditions of book design (like Eleonora Brodsky), while works by Malka Tzintziper can be used as illustrations to her fairy tales.
Sergey Levin seems to be the only artist at this exhibition, who works in the style of the so-called fantastic realism. He alleges that his works are inspired by the Dark Forces. However, at the exhibition he presented not his harsh, austere anti-Utopias, but the flower compositions, which display his admiration with the everyday quiet life of the Nature. Sergey considers “To the Memory of Vincent” as a very important work for him. For Van Gogh, a sunflower was a flower, which symbolized “the gratitude and appreciation”. “I feel a need… to apologize for the cry of despair uttered by my pictures, though my countryside sunflowers speak of gratefulness.” No wonder that Levin wanted, with this picture, to pay tribute of admiration to the artist, who is so significant for him.
Eugenia Chernomaz makes things, which are especially dear to those who wear them, who have a sort of gut feeling about them, since she is a jeweler. When you look at jewelry, you can always visualize, for whom this or that thing was intended. Eugenia’s pieces, as I see, are made for those ladies who are fond of experimenting and transfiguration, for impulsive and enamored ones. She likes orange corals and bright splashes of cast glass. She makes big-sized and rather garish things, though she manages to avoid pretentiousness; she just plays with form, color, texture. She searches for the harmonic compromise between elegance and angularity, using various sources for her inspiration: Celtic ornaments and her daughter’s drawings, Chinese knots and elements of rose windows of Catholic cathedrals.
Vladimir Kunstman is an architect and photo artist, and his works are “live coverage” coming to us from the “Life Street”. There are, however, no people in his street, but only things like whipping tops, door knobs, dolls, musical instruments – all the stuff one can find at a flea market. The artist fixes them, and they began to interact, to exist like an integrated organism. He formulates his task as “the collection of visual artifacts to be saved on the Time’s hard disk”. But in the process of collecting his artifacts, the artist creates his world, with the optimistic philosophy and religion, which is defined by the artist as “the admiration for the creation”.
Dinah Blikh works with ceramics, and she combines pictorial and sculptural elements with the perfect technique. All shelves and window-sills in her studio and home are just covered with scale models of play grounds and fantastic recreation parks. Any of these pieces is self-dependent, and can be also used as a part of a large panel, or a park sculpture, or a theater property, or an installation element. When Dinah works as a stage director or designer, she also seeks to combine various genres and styles. She creates her own reality, comparing her creative process, in a woman’s style, to the process of soup-making: one needs to blend many different elements in order to achieve the harmonic result, perfect in taste, color, aroma, and with good energetics, too. Probably, it explains the easiness, with which Dinah affiliated with this association of artists, which is still to become an art group.
They are very different, all of them, but there is one thing, which unites them: they get pleasure from their work, and the audience cannot but perceive it.
They do not claim to be the pioneers of the new art forms; they are not intending to go by a thorny path of an unrecognized genius… Their fantasies are good as such. All their works radiate “a warm light of a far-away fairy tale.
The majority of them met each other in the virtual space of Tarbut.ru virtual project. They felt sympathy to each other and united, as people do having heard their mother tongue in a foreign crowd.
They recognized each other as congenial souls, and realized that to work in “the mother tongue” is easier and more agreeable, since it makes the emotions deeper, and the colors more vivid.
Marina Shelest, curator.