Back in the 80’s both Uri and Avraham were part of the flagrant left wing spirit of Tel Aviv’s Sheinkin Street.
Uri Dotan and his brother Dani Dotan founded the "Tat Rama" and "Sheink-In" galleries and engraved the term “Sheinkiner”
In 1995, shortly after Prime Minister Rabin was murdered, Avraham Pesso, an artistic rebel, set out for Kiryat Arba and smashed a bottle of black paint on the murderous Baruch Goldstein’s tombstone, so as to “obliterate the shame”.
Exactly one year ago, the two fellow artists met and learned of a change in the artistic perspective, common to both. The revelation proceeded through extensive correspondence and online chatting, and a creation that yielded a joint exhibition where the two worlds meet vis-à-vis.
Avraham Pesso looks at the world from high up. There are no people in his paintings. Perhaps they are at home or on the road. But he is way up there, painting what a bird or an alien or god would see. What Pesso sees happens in Israel, within the artificial boundaries separating city from Arab village, old from new. From high above, the reasons for war seem as profound as the nature of man and as meaningless as the lines that time draws between the habitats of different nations. Pesso sees only the products of man’s doing; the buildings and fields, the contours of separation between worlds which could be united.
Uri Dotan climbs up to the third floor or to the top of some skyscraper to observe the docile march of people in crosswalks being transformed into an artistic secret. Dotan’s walkers split; they exist in parallel universes that briefly intersect on the zebra crossing. Which is the real one and which is the duplicate? Which one really saw the neon light and smelled the tree? Uri Dotan is a scientist-artist, in his experiments there is no distinction between original and copy, they are all of equal class. They all dance, move, insignificant like particles meeting for a split second to create that which is complete.
Two solo exhibitions making up a joint one – Avraham Pesso’s painting and Uri Dotan’s photography – call upon spectators to find a different meaning to distance, time and the human existence on earth and asphalt.
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