"It all started in 2004," says Larry Abramson (b. 1954, South Africa; immigrated to Israel, 1961; lives and works in Tel Aviv), "when I saw, on the Separation Barrier, along Route 443, a painting of the very landscape, which the wall blocked off. This was not the first time I encountered such a thing—the first case I noticed was in the Gilo neighborhood in Jerusalem. These were the days of the second Intifada, and a wall was built to block the line of fire from Beit Jala. It was ugly, and the authorities brought in artists to paint on it. They painted an ideal, somewhat pastoral landscape. Back then I was interested in the relationship between the real landscape and the represented landscape, and the way in which the latter idealizes the former, cleaning the landscape of the political. It set me thinking, but did not directly enter my studio work, as the wall painting from Route 443 did. The visual representation in the painting on the Route 443 wall was of wide arches, which is itself very interesting, because it furnishes the Israeli security concrete with an orientalist frame. Beyond this painted gateway an extremely abstracted landscape was seen, in the form of a green band of earth and a blue band of sky. The role of the painting in this case was twofold: first, to deny the wall; as if saying: 'There is no wall here, all is open to the eye'; second, to produce an illusory landscape, both visually and politically. When you think of it, this empty landscape 'realizes' the classic Zionist dream—a land without a people waiting for a people without a land; an empty, pure, virgin ground—the Zionist utopia incarnate."1 Abramson photographed this image, and took it back to the studio. At that time he was active in various groups of Israelis and Palestinians against the occupation. Along with other Israeli and Palestinian artists, he was invited to create an image for a supplement published by a human rights organization, which was attached to the local Tel Aviv weekly Ha'Ir and to a local newspaper in Ramallah, in protest of the construction of the Separation Wall and its implications on human rights. "I used the elements from the Route 443 wall to create a very basic composition, consisting of a horizontal green band at the bottom and a horizontal light blue band at the top, with a vertical black stripe cutting through the landscape. A few days later, after the work was distributed in the publication, an interesting thing happened: the streets of Tel Aviv were covered in graffiti, which was clearly based on this image."
"I had no idea who made the graffiti. I lived in Jerusalem at the time. One day, when I was visiting Tel Aviv, I got a call from a journalist, asking for a comment on the graffiti. I had no idea what he was talking about, but when I started walking around the city, I began seeing the image on walls, on bins, on Kadishman's sculpture at Habima Square, all over the place. A few days later I received a phone call, and learned that it was painted on the streets in Haifa, too. It was very extraordinary, to see my work leave the studio and reach the streets, all on its own. Even today, some two decades later, I don't know for sure who was behind
it. There were all kinds of rumors. I figured it was a group of political activists who sought a symbol that would represent the idea of two states for two peoples. Art always addresses the tension between the real and the imaginary, between the political and the aesthetic, and this was a rare moment in which the connection was made. This connection, in a language that is abstract, was significant to me; it helped me understand the political level manifest in a language, which, aesthetically, is seemingly the most detached from politics."
The next turn of this image was in the exhibition "Three Cities Against the Wall" in 2005—a project by a group of artists from New York together with Israeli and Palestinian counterparts, in the form of an exhibition that was intended to be shown in New York, Tel Aviv, and Ramallah. "It was the first time I used this image for a painting on canvas. I made three paintings entitled Israeli Abstraction. They were exhibited in New York, and subsequently at the Artists' House, Tel Aviv; unfortunately, the exhibition never made it to Ramallah. This was the period when strong opposition began to be voiced against joint Israeli and Palestinian projects, which, though always founded on a common political platform against the occupation, were being regarded by Palestinians as a normalization of the occupation."
Beyond the image's surprising adventures in the real world, Abramson explains, the entire process brought into sharper focus an artistic insight, which had begun to develop in him earlier: "In the history of art, abstraction has generally gone in the direction of the spiritual and idealistic, or in the direction of the formalistic. In past years I had already given this seemingly non-political genre quite a bit of critical thought, but this process made me rethink. I noted that what I went on to do in the studio were paintings I entitled Home, which were based on a very basic abstraction of landscape elements, such as sky, mountain, house, tree. These works are very identified with me today, but it is interesting that they began exactly in the same year that I created Israeli Abstraction. This strengthened my realization that the aesthetic and the political were not antithetical categories, but always mixed; the aesthetic is always political, and vice versa. Today I can say that a color stain smeared across the canvas is both a visual-material and a political fact."
This realization, Abramson reports, was significant for him. "I have always been politically active as a citizen, from the age of 16, and I have always been a painter, too. For years I was tormented by the question of how to combine these two sides of my life. This project and the painterly language it opened up to me placed this question right there on my work table, where the political and the aesthetic are always present and intertwine in every painting I make."
