Seeing You Seeing Me, 100x180 cm. Oil on jute canvas\ Alon Kedem

For his oil paintings, Alon Kedem (b. 1982) works on coarse jute canvas stretched over wooden crates. The two works presented here are part of an ongoing series. Seeing You Seeing Me initiates a visual investigation of reflection: images fractured across the lenses of eyeglasses, partially obscuring the eyes themselves. The painting responds to a mediated, filtered reality, echoing the way images of the recent war—relentlessly documented and circulated through news outlets and social media—returned to us as a doubling of the gaze.

We’ll Arrive Soon was completed shortly before the return of some of the hostages and the announcement of the ceasefire. A male figure—one that has accompanied Kedem’s work over the years—appears driving an empty bus through a landscape rendered in intense color. The setting is unpolished, recalling kibbutz fields rather than a defined destination. The absence of passengers, the loose, almost unstable form of the vehicle, and the tightly gripping hands on the steering wheel generate a tension between motion and uncertainty.

The painting’s title, together with the moment of its creation, charges the forward gaze with an unspoken question: where are we going?

Alon Kedem (b. 1982) is a painter and draftsman. He holds two degrees from the Art Department of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, and is the recipient of the 2011 Osnat Moses Prize for a Young Artist.