Formally Speaking

Eli Petel

In the beginning there was a photographic image, captured from the internet or a tourist guide, or conversely, a photograph taken by the artist. The four images exhibited here - North, South, East, and West - are the first quartet of a series of four quartets, and they serve as a preliminary code for the four series. The North is represented by an iceberg; the South - a wet staircase taken in South Tel Aviv; the East is a cave from Kapadokya in Turkey; and the West is the Dome of the Pantheon in Rome, photographed using a mobile phone camera. Together they represent a seemingly complete world, a type of compass of a cultural and subjective perception. An extensive act of painting then recreates them as oil on canvas, and then, through a different endeavor - technology - they are scanned and printed in their original size on photographic paper.

It seems that one has to move away from the painting in order to come closer to it without being possesive. Beyond the opaque photographic paper and the complicated work process, the passion for painting and yearning for material are still apparent. Each of the paintings alludes to a world of its own - a calculated action painting typical of Jackson Pollock (South); the romanticism of sublime nature on the brink of extinction (North) or a radiant light that becomes the possibility of sound (West), and the texture of abjection and disgust in a functional structure (East). The gesture is also in relation to photography, and the possibility of extracting more information from it than what exists in the act of painting and its appearance.

Born in Israel, 1974; lives and works in Tel Aviv