Goats
In Goats, the animal is stripped down to an almost primitive form, somewhere between a figure, a sign and a mark on the canvas. The goats seem to belong to the landscape and at the same time interrupt it, bringing something raw and unruly into the paintings.
Selected works
Goats, 2004
oil on canvas, 120x150cm
Goats, 1998
oil on canvas, 160x185cm
Goats, 1987
oil on canvas, 400x200cm
Goats, 1994
oil on canvas, 170x190cm
The paintings of Eran Shakine function as thought-documents on the meaning of painting. Contemplation of them reveals a material language which goes beyond the familiar syntax of material, form, background, support/surface.
Here the material for the making of the painting is the means and the subject of the painting itself. The boundaries and the frame of the painting do not constitute a window to a different reality, as painting has been understood since the Renaissance. The gaze is directed at the sealed interior: of the painting and of the person contemplating it.
In his biographical voyage towards the possibility of leaving only what is most essential, most necessary, the most urgent statement, Eran Shakine leaves painterly surfaces that are free of any narrative contexts, with none of the traditional hierarchy of center and peripheries. His canvases look like seared, charred skin. Like the inner side of a hide: the material that accumulates on the canvas creates a topography which depicts nothing but the landscapes of the material itself. Two canvases laden with paint are stuck to one another, allowing the moisture of the material to seep from one to the other. When they are pulled apart, a new order of painting is created, constituted between the tearer and the torn: the surface of the canvas deep beneath the paint is revealed as a scar, as a shadow, responding like an echo to the relief of material that has been pulled away, torn in body, torn in soul.
Thus the primal, unprocessed, almost unpainted material is charged, to produce a painting populated with visual, tactile, even emotional qualities. "Art is made out of nothing," Joseph Beys preached, and was quoted consistently by Enzo Cucchi. It has no need of rich materials, of expressionistic dramas, and of subjects from the world of the communications media.
Eran Shakine is extremist in his choice of the most basic materials, in order to actualize his concepts about the possibility, or the impossibility, of creating a meaningful painting today. Earth pigments, burnt sienna, ocher, lava powder and asphalt, beside chalk-like drawing and incisions, signify his affinity to the primal, the primordial, the situation of a time before style existed, before culture, as a kind of echo of the words of Barnett Newman in On the Sublime in the stormy days of New York Abstract Expressionism: "...we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, but can be understood by everyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history."
The same sense of a need to change, to leave the beaten track, today accompanies Eran Shakine. The analogy that comes to mind when looking at his works – the analogy to archaic forms, to the cave paintings, and to the hues of ancient vessels – is not coincidental. The simplicity, the directness, and the asceticism of the earth hues contain not a jot of nostalgia, but they are common to artists who have attempted to re-examine the painterly or sculptural reality.
Barnett Newman, in his pioneering quests for the most reductive expression, took an interest in earth structures that had been created by Indian tribes in the central regions of the United States. These ancient structures helped him to understand the concept of place as distinct from the concept of space, and Alfred Barr has remarked, in this connection, that for the first Kabbalists, as for Aristotle, everything was place, even the name of God.
Here it is worth mentioning Dubuffet, who in his attempt to find a new aesthetics that would be different from the classical aesthetics, found some of its sources in the art of African tribes, and the hues of his first paintings using this approach are close to those that Eran Shakine is choosing today.
Malevich, who wanted to create a new art for a new society, to begin everything anew from the beginning, created his White on White, and may be taken as a precedent for Shakine's current series of canvases, in which the white covers the entire surface like taut skin, like a spot of light which grows stronger the more one looks at it, concealing all its colors. Already in the eleventh century, Hugo de Saint-Victoire wrote that light, which contains no color, gives color to everything that is seen in the light.
The fragments of drawing and the incisions in Eran Shakine's canvases look as though they were meant to attach the material to the canvas. The lines recede to beneath the material, then reappear and vanish like fragments of thought, like a forgotten memory. Doubt is radiated over all the canvases, the painting is made of perceptible material, just as it is made of doubt, and art which grows out of nothing cannot be based on anything but doubt. Wittgenstein wrote "If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty."
The metamorphosis that transforms the arbitrariness of the material into a painterly statement of high quality is made of an incessant flow of happiness and doubts. The question, that arises while contemplating the painting which looks at us, is also the answer.
Amnon Barzel, 2000
When Horizontal Turns Vertical
When Jackson Pollock spread a canvas sheet on the floor it was a revolution. Up until that point, Painting was done on an easel (painters used an easel so that their eyes were positioned at the center of the painted platform canvas). I am referring to the Renaissance and even earlier. Placing the format on the floor or table was always left to the craftsmen.
By placing the canvas on the floor, it loses something of its artistic importance and becomes part of nature. Thus the laws of gravity affect the painting process that in turn becomes a part of them. The force of gravity is unique and important to the world in which we live. In the Far East, calligraphy artists worked for centuries with the paper laid horizontally on the floor or table. So did the Tibetian sand painters and Aboriginal artists.
When a canvas is set on the floor the artist is poised at an affixed distance between the painting and himself. The distance is determined by the artist’s height. There is no way to increase it without using aids such as a ladder. I have been painting on the floor for years, learning to fill in the shortening of perspective, not seeing the entire painting until it’s in its last stages and stretched on the wooden frame.
The canvas can lay on the floor for many months, sometimes years. It is not stretched when every few days I add another layer or spot. The canvas goes through a natural process of contracting and pulling which creates the texture- the topography of the paintings. Sometimes I only look to see what has changed, like a gardener or farmer coming to see his crops growing, trimming a leaf or tilling the ground, like it was created on its own. Every addition detracts from it.
Many times I can’t help myself and I touch it, through some sort of desire to leave a mark. Like children on a field-trip writing their names on the walls of the site they are visiting. I was here, name and address. Like on the walls of the water pit at Masada there are engravings of people’s names from thousands of years ago. In the end of the day, there are very few people who sleep standing up; most of us sleep horizontally.
Eran Shakine, 2011