Avraham Eilat:

The Fear of What is Suddenly Too Late

Avraham Eilat’s uniqueness as an artist is that even extreme experiences, such as an atrocious war, illness, or near death, do not divert him from his path, but even stimulate a new turn in his work, charging it with critical intensity and irony. Suspicious Symptoms, for example, was created while Eilat was undergoing a series of grueling radiation treatments, during which he continued going to the studio daily. He focused on color rendition of black-and-white images he found in an Italian medical textbook: microscopic enlargements of blood cells, viruses, tissues, and broken bones. Every day he painted an image from that book in color, and the images drove his work to aquatic, subcutaneous, and subcortical worlds, and to internal landscapes that arose from the images of broken bones.

A press photograph of a veiled Palestinian burning a flag prompted him to expand the circle further. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the state of Israel, three years after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination. Eilat was never inclined to incorporate photos of current affairs in his work, but during this period of a near-death experience and the body’s betrayal, he included a basic image of resistance as a social and political conflagaration, an intifada (popular uprising), introducing it as an inseparable part of the most personal of all, saying: This is my life, this is the inside and this is the outside, and this is the political. In retrospect, the work, which delves into the destructive spread of a virus in the individual body, seems to have planted suspicious symptoms of a consuming disease in the social body as well.

At this stage of coping with the disease, using the photogram technique, Eilat inserted the names of muscles signifying aggression and conceit in crushed bottles alluding to the characteristics of Israeli masculinity. A photogram is a direct imprint of an object on light-sensitive photographic paper, and a message in a bottle evokes a sense of urgency, calling to mind a survivor of a catastrophe whose time is running out. Unlike a CT scan, for example, the photogram is entirely enmeshed in the world of art, with affinities to experimental photography and drawing associated with Man Ray, to whom Eilat dedicated a tribute in a bottle.

His recent work Planets and his early film Do Not Disturb (sound: Moti Kirschenbaum) also correspond with a multidisciplinary Dadaist act whose materials are the language of the medium. Eilat directs a critical and ironic gaze at times of upheaval and pain, giving them material and mental, social and political expression, devoid of self-pity.

Galia Bar Or and

Zeela Kotler Hadari

Exhibition Curators