A long-limbed figure, drawn in thin black lines, protrudes from a barbed wire fence madeof rigid diagonals. A close look at the figure, whose arms are crossed and whose expressionis blank, doesn't help disclose its age and gender. Even the space in which it is suspended,against a backdrop of strips of blue paper, does not surrender a specific location or an absolutepoint in time through which the viewer might gain a shred of information about the imagefacing him. Rather than a categorically enigmatic work, this oeuvre seems to suggest a peekinto an interior life, a visual depiction offering a simple moment of drawing inward in quietintrospection. The absence of visual background noises, as well as the figure's ascetic bodylanguage and shut eyes, are all aesthetic choices that allow its creator—multidisciplinaryartist Addam Yekutieli (b. 1986, California; immigrated to Israel, 1995; lives and works in Tel Aviv)—to express the restrained longing to which he refers in the work's title, The Eternal Ephemeral, with utmost accuracy.
Yekutieli created this mixed-media work in 2014. It was recently featured online at GordonGallery's viewing room, alongside a number of his works from past years as well as othercreations made over the past year. The latter works were manifested by Yekutieli throughoutthe year in which the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, over 12 months that were rife withtensions and challenges; a year in which it seemed at times that the whole world washolding its breath and standing still, shutting itself behind closed doors, as does the figurein his drawing.
A closer look at the work reveals that it distills the visual language formulated byYekutieli, also known as Know Hope, throughout his fifteen years of artistic practice:A lean, monochromatic drawing style, in which the Separation Barrier, urban walls,abandoned cityscapes, and delicate birds are permanent visitors in transient worlds.During this period he created diverse studio works, artist books, text works, and drawingsin the public sphere. Through these myriad creations, Yekutieli sought to unfold the storyof the ever-escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict from his viewpoint, a conflict that rangesbetween moments of unrest and points of stagnation, halting to a standstill before itbursts once more; the love stories, memories, and routine tragedies of the people whochanced his way; and his own stories, as a bystander who documents but also assimilateshimself into the visual archive he builds.
The French novelist and filmmaker Georges Perec began the last chapter of his canonicalbook, Life: A User's Manual (1978), with a sentence that echoes in the title of Yekutieli's work:"I seek the eternal and the ephemeral at the same time."1 This oxymoronic mission seems to recur like a thread woven between Yekutieli's new works, tying them together thematically.It hovers over Above the Tangling Tides—a drawing in which the figure, identified withYekutieli, raises its hands over its head in submission, letting the birds that hold onto itsjoints pull it out of the turbulent water which the artist had marked with blue, bent and tautcables, simulating stormy waves. The search for the current, timeless feeling is also evidentin The Mental Weight, in which the same figure is seen lying on its back. Above the figure arenumerous brown bricks, stacked into a wall that stretches throughout the entire paper andfills it to the brim, suffocating the space where the sky was supposed to extend leisurely. Ahint of the complex spiritual task that accompanies these works can also be found in theforlorn T.T.S.T.H., a work in which a single, solitary figure joins another figure, and, througha telescope, they observe the sky interspersed with stars—those light-emitting giantsprojecting on our world, whose life cycles have long ended, many more years ago than wehumans can begin to comprehend.
Alongside Yekutieli's recent works, the poem "Lines" by poet and journalist Moshe Dor(1932–2016) is presented. Dor reflected on lines as symbolizing transition points betweenphysical spaces and times ("the border line, the shoreline, the exit line, the entrance line")but also as forms, expressing liminal emotional and existential positions ("the heartrendingline," "the line of birds in the mind," "the love line," "the line of starting over").2 Like Dor,Yekutieli follows a path that outlines the rifted Israeli topography. In Where One Body MeetsAnother he has drawn two figures who carry a log in a joint effort, or possibly argue withone another over the distribution of weight between them. A local map pierced withtiny holes, which the artist cut open and then soldered, is spread over them. Lines uponlines of black thread protrude from the map along the length and breadth of the borders,like question marks, emphasizing that even simple facts of life, such as the existence ofcountries, are not necessarily valid. If the state is not eternal, Yekutieli reminds us, the sameis true of the fate of the people who are fighting for the right to live in it, as masterfullyencapsulated in Dor's poem: "Longitudinal line, latitudinal line, connecting line, dividingline," "fracture line, seam line."
The lines are not only an integral part of Yekutieli's drawings; they also make up theletters from which he weaves sentences culled from conversations, interviews, and letters heexchanges with strangers who participate in his public projects, or composed in his personaltexts. Yekutieli writes these lines of text on various urban structures, at deserted streetcorners, on the walls of buildings marked for demolition, as well as in central, monumentalspaces. This act, too, carries a trace of the same longing articulated by Perec for the eternaland ephemeral, because although the work of art is an act of imprinting, which leaves anecho for generations, the words inscribed by Yekutieli are inevitably destined to disappearonce the wall they were scrawled on collapses or is pelted by rain.
Outdoor works, such as This, Even This Absorbs from 2013, reveal a considerable measureof ironic and even amused self-awareness in the artist's choice of words. This specific sentencewas inscribed on the frame of a building which looks as though its foundations had justbeen laid but might as well have been destroyed and torn down. In a work created a yearlater in a dark, deserted building in Germany, Yekutieli wrote on the wall: We Lost Nothing.The incongruence between the statement which denies the loss, and the ruined space inwhich he operated, gives rise to a new genre of poetry in which the text and its setting fuseinto one, subverting each other's meaning.
In another street work, Yekutieli scribbled the question: Can We See Each Other ThroughThis? on a concrete wall, next to a metal structure cut vertically and horizontally by zigzaggedlines, reminiscent of the borders and walls which he revisits repeatedly in his work. Wheneach word is carefully selected, it is clear that the punctuation marks used by Yekutieliare also of crucial significance. The question mark in this work is a surprising, momentarysemantic flicker of doubt, as if the artist were probing himself and the viewers encounteringhis work: Can we still feel, identify, empathize, be transformed and make changes in ourtroubled daily routine through the creation of art and as a result of observing it? With hislines, Yekutieli delineates a new way for us to experience our old, familiar lives; from the ruinsand void he forges a breathing space, line by line.
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