DSC_7066 - עותק
Meni Salama
Meni Salama
Curator: Moshe Kron
1 Nov — 13 December, 2008
The extensive exhibition of the painter Meni Salama spreads over two decades of his work. The Hebrew name of the exhibition – ז.כ.ר – has a dual meaning of both masculine and memory.
Meni Salama usually utilizes surfaces that are ‘abandoned’ – such as shelves, kitchen doors, wooden or metal boards and worn out book covers. He paints with great sensitivity, giving room and respecting the traces of the previous lives of these surfaces, while maintaining a dialogue between his own life or inner world and the sediments or finger prints of their past.
Salama is an Israeli painter. The landscape of local being, the fragility of existence and fear of death, find their expression in symbols and contents that appear and fade away in his works.
As an excellent painter, having a rare gift to lift a pencil and let the painting absorb its might, his work is poetic, purified and economical. His small scale drawing also exemplifies a choice of intimacy that invites the viewer to approach closer to the delicate, painful tissues of our lives.
The male, expected to respond in one of two options: “fight or flight”, selects “flight” in this exhibition – evading confrontation. Escaping from the danger of death, he surrenders to his lust for life. The skeleton and skull, repeatedly re-appearing in Salama’s work, represent the male who tries to renounce the characteristics of his identity as a “man of valour”.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.