For years now, Yael Oren has been exploring perception and its tricks. This type of investigation is unusual in Israeli painting culture, for it questions the very way a “world” is created via systems of imagery and our desire to create a “world” that is coherent and whole.
Oren’s work is challenging. It presents several paradoxes simultaneously, and for a moment, it may be perceived as surrealistic. In fact, Oren creates a process that is the opposite of Surrealism. If Surrealism builds fantastic, “subconscious” dream worlds, in which images from different realms create a single worldview, Oren’s work begins with execution of the same process – of assembling a painting through connecting different images – but upon closer inspection, one discovers that it is an inverse process that creates the appearance of a picture or space.
In her work, Oren seems to try to capture the moment before the birth of perception that organizes the world as a picture, and in so doing, she reveals two processes – the assembling of a “world-picture” and the dismantling of a “picture-world” – two mechanical processes. Moreover, perhaps the force that drives them more than anything else is the temptation to create a coherent picture of the world. Indeed, Oren’s work is seductive in its artistic virtuosity and the enigmatic spaces that it presents. Still, this seductiveness is akin to a spider’s web: its intent is to trap the observers and draw them into that logical, cognitive investigation, but also to strip them ultimately of subconscious and fantasy, and make them aware perhaps of their yearning to assemble or dismantle worlds.
Oren’s process is rare and unique in the art field in general and in Israeli art in particular. It does not speak the popular Israeli slang of the need for intellectual-visual exploration. The Conceptual Art tradition mainly investigated the tension between signifier and signified, and between text and image (examples include Joseph Kosuth, Jasper Johns, Raffi Lavie, Michal Neeman, and others). In Israel, in the “Tel Aviv Want of Matter” school, this tension is preserved and in addition, there is an attempt to appear always not just as an aesthetic trend but also as a concept in which the rich, sensual aspect is relinquished in favor of the intellectual-verbal aspect.
Oren chooses to investigate an entirely different tension: the tension between the symbolic and romantic and the concrete. It is no accident that her work is rich in images of stone and sky. In this sense, her painting is completely of Jerusalem, and no wonder: it was created in Jerusalem, the city where she studied, and where she works and resides to this day. Surprisingly, Oren distills from her imagery a most dynamic debate that is both political and religious, and examines the validity of the concrete and the symbolic in both the work of art and the creation of the perception.
Oren’s insistence on using the painting tools themselves and the temptation of the paintings – as well as their dismantling – is what grants power and strong, refreshing, significance to her work. Oren reinstates painting as a unique and serious medium through which various philosophical questions may be examined.
Oren’s work is challenging. It presents several paradoxes simultaneously, and for a moment, it may be perceived as surrealistic. In fact, Oren creates a process that is the opposite of Surrealism. If Surrealism builds fantastic, “subconscious” dream worlds, in which images from different realms create a single worldview, Oren’s work begins with execution of the same process – of assembling a painting through connecting different images – but upon closer inspection, one discovers that it is an inverse process that creates the appearance of a picture or space.
In her work, Oren seems to try to capture the moment before the birth of perception that organizes the world as a picture, and in so doing, she reveals two processes – the assembling of a “world-picture” and the dismantling of a “picture-world” – two mechanical processes. Moreover, perhaps the force that drives them more than anything else is the temptation to create a coherent picture of the world. Indeed, Oren’s work is seductive in its artistic virtuosity and the enigmatic spaces that it presents. Still, this seductiveness is akin to a spider’s web: its intent is to trap the observers and draw them into that logical, cognitive investigation, but also to strip them ultimately of subconscious and fantasy, and make them aware perhaps of their yearning to assemble or dismantle worlds.
Oren’s process is rare and unique in the art field in general and in Israeli art in particular. It does not speak the popular Israeli slang of the need for intellectual-visual exploration. The Conceptual Art tradition mainly investigated the tension between signifier and signified, and between text and image (examples include Joseph Kosuth, Jasper Johns, Raffi Lavie, Michal Neeman, and others). In Israel, in the “Tel Aviv Want of Matter” school, this tension is preserved and in addition, there is an attempt to appear always not just as an aesthetic trend but also as a concept in which the rich, sensual aspect is relinquished in favor of the intellectual-verbal aspect.
Oren chooses to investigate an entirely different tension: the tension between the symbolic and romantic and the concrete. It is no accident that her work is rich in images of stone and sky. In this sense, her painting is completely of Jerusalem, and no wonder: it was created in Jerusalem, the city where she studied, and where she works and resides to this day. Surprisingly, Oren distills from her imagery a most dynamic debate that is both political and religious, and examines the validity of the concrete and the symbolic in both the work of art and the creation of the perception.
Oren’s insistence on using the painting tools themselves and the temptation of the paintings – as well as their dismantling – is what grants power and strong, refreshing, significance to her work. Oren reinstates painting as a unique and serious medium through which various philosophical questions may be examined.
Noam Holdengerber