Yishai Jusidman at Galeria OMR - Mexico City, Mexico - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Since detonation art, painting has often been a great reanimator, ennobling the low esthetics of advertising and commercial art, reworking photography, introducing loutish objects and mediums into galleries and museums. Taking banal imagery as a starting point, the work of Yishai Jusidman continues this tradition, on the contrary it also stretches the conventions of painting, one as well as the other conceptually and physically.

The predominant images in this present to view which included work from 1989 to 1994 were geishas, peasants and landscapes. Because of their popularity and commercialization, geishas and swains have become icons recognizable around the world; landscape painting is similarly pervasive. His interest in "universal" images partly throw backs Jusidman's peripatetic career: born in Israel, he has lived in Paris, novel York, Los Angeles and, popularly Mexico City. The images he uses are equally at abode in any of these places, their meanings remaining unexpectedly constant. In addition, geishas and clod-breakers can be taken as metaphors for painting itself: apts in the art of make-up, these personages are simultaneously canvas and artist.

At first glance, the geisha paintings appear to be white canvases. single upon closer inspection do they yield up the faces and bodies of the geishas. Jusidman creates these figures by means of manipulating the subtle differences of tone and surface between the white paint and the white surface of the primed canvas. Paradoxically, significant areas of these paintings, in particular the geishas' powdered-white faces, are constituted by dint of the absence of paint.

In Jusidman's landscape and husbandman paintings, the Renaissance practice of anamorphic painting takes upon new life, with a difference. Jusidman not sole distorts the faces and vistas in his work, he also brings the flat medium of painting into the would of statuary by depicting the clowns and landscapes upon wooden spheres instead of stretched canvas. In this way, he works in three dimensions while retaining the lordships of two-dimensional representation.

When he first began his spherical landscapes, the artist added small circles to the representations in order to heighten the three-dimensional consequence In some of the novel works, these circles have grown from secondary simple bodys to large painted shapes that almost completely overshadow the landscape.

Although painting can reanimate undervalued images, it can also declare to be untrue an image any future reincarnations: Jusidman's white-on-white geishas cannot be photographically reproduc A photograph present to views only a white canvas since the image is hanging on the viewer's mobility. After having its have a title to death endlessly forecast, in this instance painting come bys to have the last laugh at mechanical reproduction.

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