Hebrew below

My acquaintance with Yehuda Armoni has deepened over recent years. This is thanks to group exhibitions I curated, gallery discussions, and particularly meetings held in preparation for the current exhibition and catalogue. Yehuda Armoni is a passionate and dedicated artist, a man of commitment and modesty. A man of the field who is well aware of his environment, an authentic and sincere painter.

“You know how I always find the people walking about at exhibitions so much more interesting than the paintings. This is also true of this Salon d’Automne with the exception of the Cézanne room. There all the reality is on his side… […] How humble all the objects are in his paintings. The apples are all cooking apples and the wine bottles belong in old, round, sagging coat pockets.”

     Letters on Cézanne by Rainer Maria Rilke

“As stated, these developments retreated from the subjectivist romanticism and turned instead to the outside world. Not that Rilke ignores the expressive roots of creativity…he emphasizes the personal experience at the core of creating. However (and herein lies the point he makes), Rilke maintains that the personal must be incorporated in an impersonal manner within the work itself. Whereby it appears – ‘…as necessity only, as reality, existence…the reality heightened into the indestructible’ – a product of an artistic conscience that ‘impartially imbue every existence into its color array…the words are so saddened they seek to impart artistic facts'”

     Rilke’s Letters on Cezanne – Translation to Hebrew and Preface by Shimon Sandbank, Am Oved Publishers, 2003

Most of the paintings selected for the exhibition are local Israeli landscapes, many from the area where the artist lives. Yehuda Armoni has a clear photographic ability. He takes photographs on his travels around the world, sharp compositions of excellent tonality and choice of subject matter. This ability is also evident in his paintings. Armoni leaves his home with the goal of returning with a painting. Like a hunter, his instincts lead him on his drive. He knows what he seeks, at least vaguely, and realizes when he has found the right place. Like a photographer, he captures a segment of landscape, carefully choosing its scope to suit the canvas size brought with him. Within a short time, he will create with exquisite accuracy its reference points. His simple, light, rapid execution is typified by effortlessness, airiness, breath, serenity, and the inclusion of the viewer. There is almost no expressivity, no narrative, no symbolism, no graphics, and no adornments. Armoni avoids the social, political, illustrative, romantic, or surreal. He paints what is, as it is, at that moment, capturing wide-angled landscape vistas (just as a photographer armed with a wide-angled camera). From afar, the painting is rich with objects. An array loaded with information must be depicted on the limited canvas in a short amount of time. Armoni is aware of the distance between what is there, to what is brought to the canvas, a gap that will never be spanned. He will not attempt to force the entire weight of what is onto the painting. Instead, he will translate what he sees, not what he knows is there. He will conduct a dialogue with the landscape, compromising on those elements that establish the concrete experience. In just a few strokes of paint, he quickly constructs the image. Just as in every dialogue, the ambiguity is layered in with the honesty, openness, attentiveness, and concession of the last word, transforming Yehuda’s painting into what it is, allowing the viewer to become a part of the process.

In Armoni’s landscape paintings there are usually no figures. If he does encounter people in his chosen site, he waits patiently for them to leave. Thus, he can focus solely on the arrangement of the landscape itself, avoiding any distractions from the place to its narrative.

Yehuda Armoni paints a “place”, and to some degree creates it, not “out of nothing”, but from a greater presence of “somethings”. This occurs through intention, preparation, and a search for the place that can become one of his paintings. During a short visit in my home, on a high floor of a building at the city’s edge, Yehuda walked out to the porch to see if there was a good vantage point for painting. As he returned, he let slip: “There’s a lot of open space here, but no painting”, as a professional fully aware of his craft and the knowledge that this was no place for him.

Armoni’s painting allows him to experience the place, not just view it. Neither its beauty nor its transience (or intransience) “bring” you into it. He rarely indulges in painting the sublime or monumental. The landscape he encounters receives the opportunity to become immortalized. The charm lies in the simplicity of the object, and getting down to the roots of its unique elements: authenticity and credibility in conveying the visual details as they are, the nuances of tonality, the air above the dead spaces, the areas of self-shading, the shadow falling on path or field, the accuracy of varying elevations, or special attention to the murky areas that dissipate into various grays like a lyrical abstract.

Viewing “Above Ayalon” (charcoal on paper), it seems everything previously described occurs here. From afar, the work feels like a black-and-white photograph. A grouping of rocks traverses the entire breadth of the frame, with the landscape at the forefront and at the background of the image. The work is interesting in its composition, use of light and shade, relation between theme and backdrop, near and distant areas, and the restrained drama of the rocks echoed in the sky. The general atmosphere and structure convey stability and constancy.

“…you know…that I am not very fond of color. I always feel (unimportant what actually occurs) that in the same way, color is a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph. For me, color is an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses)”
                                                           
     Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

Armoni’s black-and-white works pass the Barthes test. His art is primarily naturalistic, even when executed with intensity, passion, and freedom. Even when he “goes wild”, integrity guides each expressive stroke of color, disciplined to its place. The “frenzy” is refined through responsibility and solidity. The personal makes way for concrete. All remains within the bounds of the world “as it is”. Expressiveness disappears from the distance between object to viewer, and opens up to allow all to join the experience. As said about Cézanne, so can be said about Yehuda Armoni: “There all the reality is on his side”, and “…the personal, incorporated with impersonal anonymity in the work itself, as necessity only, as reality, existence”.

Gabi Yair, Curator
July 2017