In an exhibition of paintings, Yigal Zemer weaves a world devoid of road-marks and paths and bestows upon people and architecture a living space and silence.

The series evolved dozens of years ago, when Zemer photographed from his eights floor apartment in Jerusalem the King George Jaffa street intersection, as the stoplights changed. The photos failed to reconstruct the mayhem, the composition, the esthetics and the sentiment of the captured moment: the flow of the people diagonally crossing the crossroad, the standing cars, the ugly streets, and the orphaned architecture.

Years later – as architect – Zemer the artist, returns to the same topic. His knowledge and experience at reading buildings, drawings, software, materials, space and color, enable him to examine with greater precision and sensitivity the relationship between man and his environment. To decipher the distance and the interaction, the intimacy, the people’s flow and their relationship towards the scenery, Zemer conceals the roads and paths and the marked streets, and leaves images and space in their solitude.

Therefore, New York’s Grand-Central train station, Rothschild Boulevard, Brooklyn Bridge, Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, or India’s Madurai- a sample of locations where Zemer chooses to position the scene- become objects symbolizing stillness in a crowded bustling culture, by dropping the ground from under the images’ feet.
Zemer strives for quite as an ideology. He wants to turn our attention to the perishing resource of privacy, to over-crowdedness, and the incessant noise of modern life. Zemer achieves the quite he yearns to, in a variety of means. First, through his point-of-view on the events, from as high an angle as possible, like an omniscient narrator. Second, in the appropriate distance he establishes between the tiny colorful images positioned in the arena. The images have no distinct facial features or expression indicating their character, merely their spatial posture and physical relations with the environment hint on their interactions. Thirdly, in the space established between the tiny images and the bombastic architectural structures at their vicinity, thanks to the absence of streets, signs, cars etc. The fourth means by which Zemer creates the silence, is through the expressive medium. With extreme precision and a fluent, eloquent, highly detailed pencil, he draws immense buildings that seem to hover over the canvas. Underneath them, in incessant motion and in all directions, are colorful, vibrant images drawn in Acrylic.

The bi-polar ensemble of meticulous drawing and free drawing devoid of gravity generates a spectacular celebration of ideology on space and life.

Saturday, 26.03.16 | at 11:00

Hana Coman

Closing: 02.04.16