The Studio is a Therapeutic Place

“When I was a little boy the First Intifada happened, and then in 1991 there was suddenly the Gulf War. When I was a teenager there were terror attacks in Jerusalem and buses exploding and when I was in the army there was the Second Intifada... there’s no end to it. We live in a space where there is war, or unrest, or a certain dimension of fear that is constant. And in that sense, it’s generally in the background of my work, since I live here.”

For his oil paintings Alon Kedem (born 1982) uses coarse jute canvas, stretched over wooden crates. Two of his works are exhibited as part of Beit Avi Chai’s group exhibition, “My Life at the Moment.”

Extracting beauty from difficulty

“Everything that happens around me, in the world, in Israel, in personal life, affects my creativity,” Kedem said. “The studio is a space that allows contemplation of things that happen outside the studio, in the external world, as well as in the internal world. When the war broke out, certain images from the events we experienced entered my work. War is an extreme event, but we live in a place where there is regularly something to fear. Artists in general use the material of life, including difficult material, and turn it into something one can think about, contemplate, create perspective on, extract beauty from difficulty. Questions related to the political conflict are in my work anyway. During the war this perhaps reached a sharper tone in certain paintings.”

One example is one of the two paintings exhibited at Beit Avi Chai, which was completed not long before the return of some of the hostages and the ceasefire agreement. In it a male figure appears who has accompanied Kedem’s paintings over the years. He is driving an empty bus within a landscape that is reminiscent of kibbutz fields, depicted in intense colors. The absence of other passengers, the loose form of the vehicle, and the hands gripping the steering wheel create tension between movement and uncertainty. The painting’s title and time of creation charge the gaze forward with an unasked question: where are we going? “In the painting of the bus, the question about the passage from here to there, from us to our neighbors and vice versa, went up another level in terms of its drama, because suddenly people from our side moved there by force, and people from the other side entered here also in vehicles, as we all saw, without asking permission,” Kedem explained. “This was part of the background of this painting. The painting also asks a question about the driver: who is this person? Is he from here or from there, or maybe both?”

The second painting is part of a series of people wearing glasses.  A visual investigation of reflections: images that break on the lenses of glasses and block part of the eye itself. The work can be seen as a kind of response to the filtered reality in which we live, and it also echoes the way in which images of the recent war – which was constantly documented and broadcast by the press and social media – returned to us as a doubling of the gaze. “The question about the way we see reality versus the way the other sees it is at the heart of this series,” Kedem said, “and I think the war raised these questions to a more extreme level than before: what story are we telling about reality? What story does the other person tell? How do we see the other? How do they see us?”

In general, is your response to major events silence or increased creativity?

“For me the studio is a place to deal with things that are difficult for me, but also with things that attract me, that preoccupy me. One could call the studio a therapeutic place, a place to process life experiences. And therefore usually when I have some difficulty I go to the studio. Obviously in the first days of the war I was busy protecting myself and my children, but quite quickly I returned to the studio, even just for a few hours, as much as was possible. The first works I created right when the war started were influenced by it directly, even by October 7 itself and the images from it.”

Do you think art is better when it’s created after a while – after gaining some perspective on the events that occurred – or when it’s created in real time?

“In general, I think art needs perspective. On the other hand, art is always in the present. That is, it’s always an event that happens in the present of the person, as they live it. Perspective has levels. If someone is now hiding in the bushes on October 7 and starts to paint a painting I would say that’s a bit extreme, but if it happens a few days later, then one can say there’s already a perspective that's a bit more enabling.

To say whether a work a person made has value that transcends that moment requires time, but that’s related to evaluation, to judging the work. For the creation itself in my view there are no rules. It can deal with something that happened to you with your mother this morning, or with a partner, and you can also deal with something that happened to you thirty years ago when you were a child, or with something that happened a hundred years ago, when your grandfather was a child.”

Do you think that we are facing a depressing era in museums and galleries? Are we facing a decade of sad and dark post-war art?

“Israel is a place that was born from a very great trauma that in its very birth created local trauma. Some say that art here was never happy, it was always quite dark, and certainly in the early years. But things move on and go to all kinds of places, in art it’s not so absolute. My grandmother would say that whoever likes to eat sugar is a sad person. Sometimes from difficulty comes art full of humor or joy, events produce reactions and counter-reactions, there are no clear rules.

“We live in a place that is very on edge, and therefore some of the content that emerges here in art is not easy, and I think the role of the artist in general is to also engage with such things. Even without relation to war, being in the world is not an easy thing, no matter where you live.”

What in your view is the role of art? For whom and for what are you doing this?

“That’s a question I ponder frequently, and I don’t always have a good answer. Art has many roles. A year ago, a psychologist who deals with trauma gave a gallery talk at my exhibition, and we considered the role of art in this context, and he offered an interesting metaphor. He described someone who experienced trauma as if they took on 600 tons of explosive material, and their close circle, the family, the therapists, they receive part of the blast wave and help the person deal with it. But therapists and family can ultimately only help isolated individuals. The role of culture, the psychologist suggested, is to treat – not in an intense dose like a psychologist, but it can absorb part of the blast wave and distribute it among millions of people.

“Art does many things, its role is to make us contemplate reality in more perspectives, in ways we’re less accustomed to, interesting ways, sensitive ways. Artists can be like very sensitive seismograph devices of what’s happening in external and internal reality, and give it expression. And then, as an audience, we can look at their art and feel we’re not alone. That the questions, the challenges, the things that attract us or threaten us are normal, they’re part of life in this world. Art can bring comfort, beauty, it can bring up a smile, connect person to self, person to person, it has many roles.”

Visit the exhibition “My Life at the Moment”>>

Main Photo: We’ll Arrive Soon\ Alon Kedem 200x180 cm. Oil on jute canvas