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Prof. Nurit Govrin: Jacob Porat’s Kafka
The paintings of Jacob
Porat converse with Kafka on the backdrop of Kafka’s home city – Prague - in a multi-layer “correspondence”.
One layer is Porat’s paintings. The second consists of photographed sites in
Prague. The third includes pen drawings made by Kafka, and the fourth depicts Kafkaesque
situations taken from Kafka’s works. And the fifth layer is that of the
viewer, who draws near the paintings to look and reveal the worlds hidden
inside, one on top of the other, one coming out of the other. The longer one
looks at the paintings, the more details are discovered and layers excavated,
the complexity of the worlds depicted proliferates and deepens. The viewers
bring themselves to the paintings. However, the more versed they are in Porat’s
artistic world, the more real their familiarity with Prague, and the more they
feel at home in Kafka’s works, the more responsive they become to the
paintings. They can then interpret them by peeling off layer after layer of
the open meaning, of a symbol never fully construed.
Jacob
Porat is distinguished by his search for different, various forms of
expression. The exhibitions he has held throughout the years expose the
constant and changing elements of his works in all possible aspects:
techniques, compositions, and themes. Although evident in his work, his
literary education does not make his paintings an illustration of literary
writings. Rather, it serves as the driving force of the painting, an enabler
of deeper expression and intricacy of the visual statement. Porat’s
paintings have a life of their own, and these lives have been an integral part
of his works since he has begun painting to date. His works in general, and
“Conversations with Kafka” in particular, strike a correct balance between
the “painting instinct”, which is based on intuition and talent and the
intellect that is aware of itself and of the literary interpretation of
themes.
Porat’s
continuous pursuit is associated with his unsteady, difficult and diverse
childhood, his search for Jewish and Israeli identity, his assimilation of
past events and family history, as well as of Israeli present and society and
his place in them.
His standing within several artistic branches – painting, literature, music,
and photography – allows him to assemble the special of each, creating a
unity of contradictions.
The Kafkaesque
figure in Jacob Porat’s series of Kafka paintings stands opposite the closed
gate, waiting for it to open. Made of ornate iron or arched stone at the entry
to a house or wall, the gate is concrete, realistic, and traceable to specific
buildings in Prague. The Kafkaesque figure is
part of the gate, swallowed into it, protruding from it or entangled in its
twists. However, it is also the metaphorical gate found inside any person as
well as in one’s relations with other people and the world. This is a gate,
which at the same time blocks the road and a personal gate designated only for
the person standing opposite it.
The tall and thin Kafkaesque
figure is placed in a huge church space, hovering against colorful vitrage,
always conflicting with authority: the Father-God. Yet another extension of
the figure is positioned in the space inside a fence-cage, like a culprit in
court. This is a conflict between Judaism and Christianity, between man and
superior forces that turn a deaf ear, between man and the law enforcing
authorities. This conflict is open to additional conflicts and
interpretations, which the paintings offer their viewers.
The paintings are a
splendid aesthetic expression of a world of nightmares, of frightful dreams
becoming concrete, of the encounter between madness and nightmare and the
logical, sane, and clear. They manifest art’s exclusive ability to unify
conflicts and contradictions, to express lunacy by aesthetic means, and to
concurrently depict contradictory situations: terror and beauty, colorful
loneliness, styled nightmare, terrestrial hovering, and life growing out of
death.
This
exhibition is yet another brick in the glorious buildings of paintings
inspired by literature and juxtaposing these two realms of art. It is an
interpretive, principle confrontation between the worlds of literature and
painting, and between the worlds of Kafka and Jacob Porat. However, more than
anything else, it is a confrontation with the world of the readers-viewers –
their way of deciphering Kafka's works on the background of Prague and their
comprehension of Kafka paintings by Jacob Porat.
[Prof. Nurit Govrin, Tel Aviv University]
Prof. Govrin - Hebrew Back to Exhibition Opening speech Kedar Hebrew Comments 1 Comments 3
New: Conversations with Kafka - Video Comments and remarks by various Artist