Yuval Orly

(Oil on canvas)

Art is one of the only fields through which you can travel in time and bring to the surface distant memories as if they were a roadmap etched in your mind. These memories could be of your own, or even memories of others.

In these oil paintings I try to capture distant memories from different places throughout my life.

The pictures are smudged as if I'm gazing at the landscape from a running car.  Just like the paintings, my memories are not always focused, my dreams, anyones dreams can never make obvious sense but, like the paintings, the pleasant feeling of a revisiting  memory is important for me, while the exact figurative details are no more than secondary.

Quotes from the introduction written by Galit Semel, curator of Yuval Orly exhibition at the Tel Aviv Artist Gallery This exhibition presents the artist dialogue with historical events as well as present political circumstances the way those are reflected in the mass media (TV, radio, newspapers).  Overall, the ‘political’ works of Yuval Orly are inspired by the art of opera composition.  The raw material nourishing this series is daily news reporting political dramas that Orly transformed to visual expressions meant to stir the emotional response of the viewer, making one taking a stand in view of the events.  Structurally, the images and the Triptychs are inspired by, Goya's paintings, Japanese prints from the 19^th century, the Guernica of Picasso and Pieter Brueghel the Elder work.

The expressive works reflect the artist own emotional response to the events he describes while paving the way toward to an individualized style in painting.  The colors are vivid and dramatic and the composition is intense yielding allegorical figurative paintings soaked in information and references to great artists of the past, who inspired Orly in the way they responded on canvas to event not less dramatic of their times.  Orly’s troubled mind in times of suicide terrorists, political disputes, the collective trauma of Amona’s settlers evacuation, and the ethical protest of Israel’s Air Force combat pilots... all seem to find catharsis on canvas.

Orly is also amazed in view of the power the mass media have in its ability to shape the people minds while quoting a Marshall MacLuhan quote in this regard (“The medium is the message”).  In his painting Orly is deeply concerned, yet, does not fight the possibility that he might turn to be an individual controlled by the mass media.  He accepts the possibility that he is ‘a product’ of such era...

The paintings are not celebrating the government, but criticize it. Orly places the artist as an observer and a reporter of reality through his own eyes. In this way Orly identifies the artist as a type of a journalist.

(Oil on Sculptured Canvas)

In the beginning of 2002 Yuval Orly began an artistic research which tried to diagnose the relationship between sculpturing and painting, also questioning the necessity of colors and the importance of composition in general.

Orly was fascinated by the possibility of creating a painting that creates a dialog with the world of sculpturing, yet at the same time remaining able to maintain its autonomy as a picture, oil on canvas, that meant to sculpt a composition in a square format, hanging on the wall.

The paintings are sculptured in canvas, stretched on top of different three dimension objects, creating a three dimensional picture. These compositions were carefully planned in advance. The whole process evolved through the sculpturing process with the intent to use afterwards only one color, the white color (oil), in various techniques.

The basic idea was to create a three dimensional composition, that will replace the colors and contours of traditional compositions in a painting. The shadows that are created through the objectified paintings create it’s own fluid visibility. The light in the room affects the picture in a way that the artist, who created the piece, can no longer affect it .

Occasionally and in order to slightly vary the experiment, Orly allowed himself to add to the composition a single color other than the color white, intended to maintain the neutral effect of the piece.