Ibn Ezra Corner of Don Quixote/Juan

Panorama, Anti-Panopticon, and Erasure

Ilan Itach’s works are visual panoramas woven through several dimensions of perspective and consciousness. Heart Wrapped in Salt is a real, meditative panorama: ten tableaux on a single canvas scroll, unfolding an expansive, associative, metaphysical narrative of people, events, places, and times from the artist’s unique world. Ibn Ezra, Leonard Cohen, Hermann Hesse, and Sancho Panza intertwine with locations such as Granada and Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda Market, alongside motifs associated with spiritual journeys, love and death, all brought together simultaneously. This work forms the heart of the other panoramas, which extend it to the farthest reaches of perception. Facing it, Encounter with a Shaman and Untitled serve as direct responses, offering interpretations and spiritual depth, transforming the exhibition as a whole into a conceptual panorama that spins-spans 360 degrees, without beginning or end. Each piece can stand on its own, yet they were deliberately united by the artist to create a multidimensional, conceptual, autobiographical, historical, cultural, and emotional panorama. The resulting super-panorama emerges between the artist’s mental, panoramic gaze and the viewer’s mental and cultural panoramic perspective, expanding the scope of the painting’s panoramic gaze.

Panoramas are controlled representations of landscape and space. Itach transforms these representations into spatial categories of the psyche, in harmony with modern social psychology theories. While the panoramic, social and unconscious gaze seeks to map people and objects to control power relations, compartmentalize, and classify—much like the panopticon—Itach’s gaze strives to redirect the mental panorama towards its participatory and connective aspect. The expansion of the field of vision in his work is an expansion of the struggle and the capacity to share gazes formed between two viewers, responding to the multidimensional panoramic gaze offered by the artist. The human panorama is not the imperial panopticon, but a human field of vision, ever-expanding and inflating in the dynamic, multifaceted spaces of the other, in pursuit of the metaphysical and the miraculous beyond. The panopticon is a prison; the human panorama is an infinitely unfolding world; not merely a yearning to see everything, but to see with a single, all-encompassing gaze, despite the inevitable pain and sorrow it entails.

Albert Suisa