Artists

Artists

Uri Blayer

Uri Blayer

Selected Works Biography
SLIDESHOW

Uri Blayer

The Painter is a Stranger

 

Uri Blayer is strange, an anomaly in the very society which bore him. His early youth is the environs of Tel Aviv and a stint in an "arts high school" certainly qualify him unremittingly as a certified provincial thoroughbred championing the Duchampian creed. And yet, Uri Blayer appears to be a perfect stranger in his own country.

As a young man Uri set out for the Negev desert in Israel where in an abandoned hut which served as his studio and home for the next two years, he painted the desolate landscape before him from direct observation. Those early works with their fascinating spatial explorations, done in almost total isolation, suggested a rare painterly intelligence.

Many are the young artists who set out on their odyssey abroad, regrettably, only to seek out the familiar. Few are they who are fortunate enough to fall upon an individual who is an inheritor of an authentic painterly legacy. And few are those who are willing to become truly a student in order to acquire a teacher. Lennart Anderson linked Uri Blayer to an artistic ancestral chain and painting legacy going through Edwin Dickinson back to Gustave Courbet.

This encounter was cathartic for Uri, a purging. He was purged of the burdensome baggage of a past which mistakenly perpetuates the notion that the word is the only transmitter of thought and feeling, and a Byzantine present where the visual never transcends the semiotic, the sign. He was purged of a history profoundly anthropophobic. He was purged of a so-called new tradition and devotion to a vacuous utopian secularism. He was purged of the cerebrality of "work and land" and freed to embrace the sensuality of nature and craft.

Uri is now a stranger, and paints as a wonderful stranger would, with humble Cotot-like openness and directness, and with the excitement of an unaccustomed eye as sensitve as an exposed nerve.

Israel Hershberg

Jerusalem, December, 1999

 

Uri Blayer

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