| Back Home - Yitzhak Ben-Ner |
 From time to time I return to Kfar Yehoshua, village of my birth, the village where my family and friends, members of the second and third generations, live – and this return is always, as I return home to Tel Aviv, somewhat disappointing in its repetitive routine. My homecoming to the village through the works of Eli Shamir is always more exciting, more experiential. Those familiar landscapes, the plowed clumps of earth in the fields, the cows in the sheds, the roofs of the chicken coops, the cypresses, the dust and the chicken coop odors – and, first and foremost, the generations of villagers posing in profound solemnity for Eli Shamir's examining and loving eye, for his hand, his pens and brushes – they are the village, like a truth which no sealed and signed document, no artist's photograph, can create.Why? Maybe because of the multidimensionality that I find in these paintings – in Eli Shamir's people of the present and contemporary landscapes. In his works people and landscapes from the past open before me without explanation or reason. Maybe because everything and nothing has changed, in fact. For the cows in the cowshed yard are the same cows, the dogs strolling in the farmyard or crouching in the shade at the front door are the same dogs of our childhood. The apples ripening on the boughs are those which we bit into back then, with the lust of world explorers, as soon the early blush began to peek through their unripe greenness. And the tanned people, with their furrowed faces, a hat shading their wise eyes that glint with a cynical doubt, are those who were youths and children in the days when I myself was a child and a youth. Eli Shamir sees the village and the valley, in their future dimensions, with a fear of doom. The landscapes in his works are almost never as bright-green as the valley landscapes in spring, familiar to anyone chancing at this beautiful corner of Eden. Mostly these are wide, plowed cornfields waiting to be sown, or irrigated fields with withered foliage. Never beginnings, I think; neither green buds and gay water splashes in irrigation pipes, nor representations of the fourth generation smiling with the complacency of village sons, driving a sophisticated tractor or combine. Here's a dead ox, bloated, cast at the edge of the picture. Here are Arab workwomen and Chinese workmen, and the painter and his family in white robes, like a paraphrase of a foreign mythological class. The late Eliyahu Amitzur, veteran founder and survivor, who was the village prophet and conscience, has survived only among the portraits. Like in a story I once wrote, which is partly quoted here, a foreign wind casts a threatening shadow on the village and the valley, in Eli's works. Thirty-five years have elapsed since the story was written. The village and the valley, maybe the whole country, are no longer a refuge and a shelter until the storm blows over.  And maybe I am wrong. For me, Eli's work on and about our village preserves, beyond the sense of doom, or fear of it, everything that I seek in a homeland village: beauty, peacefulness, different scents, arms open to embrace and a shady green path leading me, the old man and the child, even in my contemporary writing, into the depths of the meaningful, exciting experience of homecoming, after so many generations. Tel Aviv, February 2009 |