Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov

The Painter and the Hassid, diptych, oil on canvas, 2008, 80 x 60 cm (32” x 24” )

The Painter and the Hassid
Artspace Gallery, Jerusalem
2011

In this series of paintings I created an imagined visual encounter with and between two creative individuals: Malva Schalek, a Prague-born painter whose works were discovered after World War II between two walls in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, and Kalonymos Schapiro, a Polish-born rabbi whose writings were discovered after the war inside a milk jug in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto (and were later published as “Esh Kodesh – the Holy Fire”). Both were murdered, yet their works survived, hidden.

The starting point for the series was a sense of wonder at the commitment of these two people to their creative work even in a life-threatening situation, from the point of view of an artist who struggles to create only in the face of day-to-day exhaustion and distraction. The paintings in this exhibit attempt to touch on that extraordinary creative power and perhaps gain some understanding of it. However, the inability to really comprehend what people underwent in that time led to the use of the diptych format in many of the works in the series; two canvasses with a border between them that also constitute one work – on the one hand, two distant planets, here and there, and on the other, the exact same world (despite a gap of about seventy years). I recognize the border between here and there, yet attempt to cross it nonetheless.

The series touches on the humanity emanating from the works of the Painter and the Hassid, from Malva Schalek’s sensitive rendering of people soon to be erased, and from the caring outcry echoed in the writings of Rabbi Schapiro. This outcry raises many questions about the ability to believe in God, and some of the works travel along the seam between faith and doubt. A parallel is drawn between the difficulties and challenges posed by art and by faith to those who choose them as life paths.

A number of paintings conjure up the hiding places of the works, time-capsules concealed without knowing if they would be discovered, using a painterly interplay of light and darkness. These images are a fertile ground for thoughts on the place of the internal and the unknown in the creative process, vs. the need for exposure and communication which may also be essential to it.

The relationship between word and image is also examined in many works in the series, the final ones enlarging Rabbi Schapiro’s crowded and almost unintelligible Hebrew script from the original manuscript and turning it into painting. The unreadable signs are analogous to the impossibility of understanding what happened, yet they also contain the writer’s unending attempts to find a story that will leave him with God’s love despite His apparent apathy.  These attempts lead to the idea of Batei Gavaei, the innermost chambers, in which God cries in sorrow, and which humans can enter and rebuild their bond with Him. In my work this mysterious place is the rusted, beaten and earthly vessel in which the manuscript was hidden.

The paintings attempt to connect worlds far apart – the worlds of the Painter and the Hassid, a universal Judaism that is open to other cultures with traditional Hassidic Judaism; and between my world and worlds that have been lost forever.

Ruth Kestenbaum Ben-Dov