Marzipan cafe in Budapest
As I was sitting one day in a café in Budapest, doing my daily sketching, doodling and men-watching, I have suddenly experienced a severe sense of dislocation related to time and space. As I was trying to get a hold on some familiar context, I became acutely aware of the fact that we live in the world that has fragmented into million pieces, in which it is almost impossible to find a unifying principle for all the different points of view that would still make sense.
At the price of diversity and freedom we have lost the ability for coherency and left to float in a world of bits and pieces of information that do not add up to a meaningful structures that could nourish our desire and need for clarity, order and a sense of place.
I was born in what used to be a Soviet Union, moved to Israel, lived in US and Budapest, Hungary and feel very lucky to be able to experience all those different cultures. At the same time there is a sense of loss of identity that becomes even more pronounced as the global communication systems bring us closer to each other but obliterate our uniqueness.
Musing over these and similar ideas I became aware of the importance of a focal point from which it is possible to construct a set of correspondences that would allow for coherency both, on the visual and the conceptual levels.
The two ways to organize space and time, the grid of straight lines and the circle can be a very powerful combination trough which it is possible to build a world that is diverse enough to allow creative thinking and visualizing and at the same time has a focal point that enables to preserve coherency and context.
Grid and Circle
In the past 20 years I have been trying to apply these principles in my art and especially in my recurring theme of the café.
The café for me is both a place for socializing with people and one of themes in my art that allows combining all of my favorite subject matters.
Portraits, stillife, the human figure in all its endless variety of poses that sometimes border on the unimaginable, cityscape, landscape and by extension, every imaginable subject matter, all can be combined in this great theme of the café.
On the conceptual level, the café represents the stage on which people improvise freely and spontaneously, moving, gesturing and converse animatedly with each other. It is a meeting place between different worlds with many layers of meaning superimposed one above the other, allowing me to explore a rich variety of styles and mediums. Working live in the café, I sketch with pencils, watercolors and even crayons.
A couple in cafe
Later when doing more elaborate studies I further explore the scenery trough small studies with oils on canvass. Sometimes a face would be enough as a trigger, other times it is the classic view of a couple engaged in conversation, changing positions that can be seen in a fast motion camera shots as a secondary dialog of body language that many times adds an additional layer of meaning to the formal architecture of the scenery.
Between Massarik sq and Lance hid
Along with the traditional formal values and the structural elements of any given composition, there are also the layers of time and space which I am using not necessarily in a linear manner, allowing the mixing of cubist space with more than one vanishing point with many possible horizons.
The cubist non linear space allows me also to use the dimension of time in a more open way combining different frames of time and periods as well as different styles, all striving to balance each other on the surface plane of the canvas.
Giorgio de Chirico, some of the street scenes of Balthus, Picasso and Braque, David Hockney with his superb photo collages and Neo Rauch are just some of my stylistic influences each of those great artists providing me with relevant examples of using space in a non linear way and still preserving the realistic sensibility to structural integrity of form.
In our age of “cut and paste “paradigm it is possible and necessary to use it creatively allowing to integrate smoothly and seamlessly, a scene from a movie, a prominent figure from the past, switch backgrounds and use them as a backdrop in a theatrical play.
The table at the café with its central vertical and horizontal axis usually hidden in the background is a disk whirling in space providing a stable point from which all the lines disperse and converge, building an intricate grid on which the whole scene can rest, secured within a framework of visual and thematic correspondences.
With the appearance of cyber space it has become even more urgent to find a focal point in our individual minds that are rapidly approaching a stage in which we will be immersed in one Universal Mind.
