SOU
Yonatan Ullman
1. To see a world in a grain of sand
The gallery is dark. Illuminated squares flash from the core of the darkness. A strange hybridization of minimalism and maximalism; of the severely austere with the spectacular. The cubes hold secrets, wwithin and without, a movement like diving into water and soaring into space. Inside the cube that reflects the brain there’s a portable hard drive containing all the lectures the artist has ever given – everything he knows, as the work's title purports to declare. We enter a mirrored maze of art that gazez at itself, like a camera pointed at a monitor, seeing itself looking at itself, infinitely.
2. …And the heavens in a wildflower
Western art is a reflective creature. Western painting looks at itself. Paintings within paintings, paintings of chapters in art history, paintings of the back of paintings, and paintings of the myth of painting's birth are just a few examples (which have preoccupied me in recent years) of this tendency.
At least since the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, Western art has been a creation inseparable from its author. Artists are not anonymous workers in an industry of images for ornamental and ritualistic purposes, but rather authors with a history, character, and spiritual and intellectual stances, identified with stylistic tendencies and with their life story reflected in their work.
3. To hold infinity in the palm of your hand
These things are ffamiliar and almost self-evident, but once in a while they raise questions about boundaries. Is Nietzsche's laundry note a philosophical text? Is a painter's doodle on a piece of paper while he's on hold with the bank clerk a drawing?
Many years ago, when I was a student at the Jerusalem Arts high school, my painting teacher spoke to us about composition and color. In class, we painted abstract paintings and arranged color splotches side by side. When I returned home, my mother asked me to help prepare the
salad. I sliced a cucumber, a tomato, I don't remember what else, and then it occurred to me to arrange the cut vegetables on the cutting board in the same composition I had tried in class. I looked at the board with the red of the tomato below and the green of the cucumber above. Afterward, when I was asked to hang laundry to dry, I arranged the blue jeans at the top and the red shirts at the bottom, and the rest of the clothes according to the same logic of that composition. I remembered that day when recently I left Yonatan Ullman's studio: if I think about composition when I prepare a salad or hang up laundry, the question arises, when do we stop being artists?
4. …And eternity in an hour
Ullman's current exhibition is concerned with blurring the line between art and life. It seeks to perform the following strange move: to take the incidental doodle of someone waiting on the phone for an automated response and transfer it to canvas; to take life’s sites, where we teach, lecture, dream, cut vegetables, and hang laundry, and view them as part of the creative life, as part of our enterprise of producing aesthetic expression of mental content. Simply put, Ullman's work raises the anxiety that art will devour our lives, or perhaps that our lives will devour art. In this, Ullman joins a rich tradition from Rembrandt to Sophie Calle.
However, the works have an additional, slightly more contemporary, slightly more idiosyncratic aspect: they address the representation of knowledge, the relationship between consciousness and technology; between the brain and a portable storage unit. They deal with Ullman being a lecturer on art history. He lectures about the artists who preoccupy him as a creative person, whom he has researched out of passion. Artists who are somehow present in his studio work. But they are also about how he tries to transcend the dictatorship of knowledge. When he takes off into space or dives into the depths: meditation and dream, body and soul – everything that is beyond the intellect’s reach.
Let's imagine a world where a person's consciousness can be downloaded to a USB drive. My argument is that there is something unknown inscribed in the empty space around the letters, some negative surplus that is at the heart of consciousness, the core of a person's soul, the root of their being, which cannot be downloaded to a USB drive. This negative surplus, the void in the illuminated boxes, is, in my opinion, the subject of this exhibition.