Echoing The Abyss

Echoing The Abyss

In his works, Shaul Gadish uses layers of images illustrating his intensive inner emotions to create staged worlds. He works repetitively, as if in an ongoing ritual, obsessively attempting to understand the conflicts of his mature self throughout the eyes of his childlike self, struggling to reveal this conflict to himself and to others.
To paraphrase Kafka, from his book Letter to His Father(Bilingual edition. New York: Schocken Books, 1966) “he thought he was making a sculpture, but he just kept hitting the same crevice through stubbornness – and more like, though helplessness.” Thus Gadish also described the feeling of the journey of discovery feeling in his works – like an echo trapped in an abyss.

Gadish starts with photography, he intuitively cuts from the frame pictures of un-staged reality, selected after a process of searching and identification.
The objects and sites in these photographs serve as a base of images, disconnected from place and time. He uses them to stage situations of a more complex reality intertwined from various life episodes in various landscapes and surroundings, to create a new reality that resembles a still scene from a movie.

To start, Gadish creates staged ‘street photographs’, as continuous, considered and balanced backdrops in which exist power systems between light and dark and between metaphorical, anonymous figures. Sometimes there is a connection between the figures, and sometimes it is the lack of connection that creates powerful manipulations, that are contained within a visual conversation between black depths and flickerings of light. Thus a world is created in which both truth and illusion exist.

Next, like a “zoom in”, Gadish focuses on the figures until the background almost disappears and the figures take center stage and it seems as if they almost leap out of the picture. The use of darkening of shades and an increase of sharp contrasts creates a gradual focusing in on the figures that compels the spectator to move in and out – with curiosity and aversion, similarity and alienation, empathy and anxiety.

Gadish’s work invites the viewer to enter a fundamental and powerful personal-emotional world. An array of desires, locked emotions, fears, pains, dreams and opportunities motivate him – consciously and subconsciously.

Shaul Gadish, born in 1968, lives and works in Gedera. Studied photography at the Camera Obscura school; art and photography at the Midrasha Teacher’s Training College and studied with artist Eyal Ben Dov. He has participated in several group exhibitions and this is his first solo exhibition showing work from the last three years.

Bat-sheva Granit