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'The Eumenides' ( 'The Kindly Ones' )

In this series of figurative painting, each artwork was built as a replica of a classical painting depicting a mythological story, which serves as the foundation for a contemporary local development. This is a series that tells local stories through familiar Western visuals.

The series was created with women in mind. The vulnerability and weakness, the exploitation and violence that women have experienced throughout history and to this day, brought to my creative surface a deep need to grant them mythical power both retroactively and preemptively. This is done while examining how they have been perceived throughout history as part of the old culture, versus the new one.

The fascinating question of the desire for revenge versus the pursuit of justice occupies me today. I recruited to my side the goddesses of revenge—the Erinyes (the Furies) - who were strong enough to change the world order, and were therefore considered evil. But in my eyes, they are the strong women we all need to be. I immersed myself in the works of various classical artists who excelled at painting mythological stories and addressed women caught in tragedy.

The title 'The Eumenides' refers to the mythological story of the Erinyes, the goddesses of revenge, who were invited by the goddess Athena to sit on the High Court of Justice.

..."This tragedy concludes the Oresteia trilogy. The Erinyes, goddesses of revenge, pursue Orestes, and the god Apollo sends him to be judged in Athens. To this end, the goddess Athena founds the first criminal court. The Erinyes and Apollo clash in the trial, at the end of which Orestes is acquitted. Athena convinces the Erinyes to reside in Athens as 'Kindly Ones' (Eumenides) and to leave matters of blood vengeance to civil judges. The Oresteia is the great tragic masterpiece dedicated to humanity's journey from bloodshed to the creation of the concepts and tools through which justice is served."
(From: 'The Eumenides' – Aharon Shabtai)

 

Medium: All the works are oil paintings on canvas mounted on wood.

Artistic Definition: The series is entirely composed of homages—replicas of original works (Transcriptions) - while I add a personal interpretation influenced by the current time and place.

 

In my transcription process, I sought to trace the existing visual material of classical masters whose works continuously occupy my thoughts as a painter, and whose mythological stories remain deeply relevant today, embodying the realization that history repeats itself time and again. My initial thought is always associative, and from it grow the formal ideas that lean upon these familiar figurative gestures.

In some of the works, water surfaced as a motif bearing the concept of disaster - a personal and collective drowning that illustrates danger and obsolescence. The water reached places where it was completely unexpected, and I flowed with this thought. For instance, in the painting – 'the lost girl' after Tintoretto’s Bacchus, Venus and Ariadne, the figure of a simple laborer who replaces Bacchus - approaches the young girl (Ariadne) gently, emerging as if floating out of a watery space or a drowned region, above which Venus floats/hovers.

Color appears as a significant factor in several works. For example, in the parts where water appears, and also where the landscape transforms, such as in the work ' A girl in the wood' after Poussin’s Satyr and Nymph in a Landscape. Here, the scenery surrounding the intimate event changed and became a local landscape of green grass and blue skies, in which the satyr and the bleeding nymph are planted. All of these turn the original playful, smiling intimacy into a local tragedy.

Similarly, in the two replicas titled Lucretia, the colors - blue, white, and also the yellow of the wheat stalks - were meant to reinforce the feeling that arose in me while working on them, which sharpened my understanding that Lucretia is, in fact, Israel

 

Since the massacre of October 7th, 2023, every thought has become intertwined with death and human suffering. This was also the case for thoughts regarding art. Following an initial feeling that art had died, other sensations began to surface - ones in which every pictorial image of classical art I knew transformed and became something else entirely. Coupled with these sensations arose the desire to realize an artistic homage that would connect the old world of those masterworks to a new world where such horrific events are possible.

In doing so, I also sought to preserve the memory of the women who were there, and perhaps to create a new mythology for them, one in which they are goddesses or witches who have triumphed over evil.

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"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea."
— Book of Revelation, 21:1

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