Painter Amnon Ben-Ami is a reticent man. Allday long he deals with paint, ideas, subjectmatter, though he sometimes says to him-

self that he doesn’t really care about the details.As we speak, he reclines on a pillow at the topgallery of his studio in Talpiot overlooking theHoly Land complex and Teddy Stadium, smok-ing cigarettes intermittently. He explains that heusually works quickly, an approach that has todo with immediacy.

“I do what I do, and then I put it aside,” saysthe 54-year-old artist. “If you came here in twoweeks or if you’d come here two weeks ago,you’d see completely different paintings on thewall.”

Ben-Ami’s work is both conceptual and formal,free and exact. He incorporates comic lines, sim-plistic drawings and shapes with skilled painter-ly care and concern. His works are connectedwith trying to understand the differencebetween visual and intellectual thought. “Thesource of the word ‘idea,’ in Plato, has to do witha shape, with something visual,” he explains.“In today’s lingual world, ‘idea’ is more con-nected to words than sight.” He wonderswhether there’s a way that this double meaningcould still function in its original way. “When Ispeak of a shape, do I also speak about its idea?”

These are the kinds of abstract ontologicalquestions that are behind the outwardly ordi-nary subject matter that one sees in Ben-Ami’spaintings. He comes back to these subjects afteryears sometimes. One example is his recentpainting Shower. He explains that he’s had sever-al works connected with the bathroom, shower,shampoo.

“More and more, I have confidence in intu-ition,” he says. “I feel like working with sham-poo, and it sits comfortably in my mind forsome time – an hour, a week, a year. I don’t lookfor further justification.”

In fact, he says that slowly the oppositebecomes true: If he has some sort of justifica-tion, it repulses him. “Because there can be nojustification for painting.”

Once the subject “sits comfortably” for a cer-tain period, the notion of immediacy returns. Inthe case of Shower, Ben-Ami further delved intothis notion by working from a photograph thathe also calls “Shower” and that he also considersa work of its own. In terms of the painting itself,he says he sometimes worked from the photoand sometimes from memory. “It isn’t clear tome which one is more immediate,” he muses.

Ben-Ami’s work is concerned not just with thephysical process of making a single painting butwith the process of creation that relates to mean-

ing and the way that meaning develops fromone act to another. He recently finished a seriesof four interrelated paintings. The first painting,on a strip of paper 30 x 70 cm., is a painting hecalled Mountains, in plain raw umber and white.He says he had the Sinai Mountains in mindwhile painting but that the work itself is “figu-rative” and doesn’t relate to those mountainsspecifically.

Then he painted a complementary work in thesame format, an abstract blue-and-white workwith medium-width brushes and stormy butcontained strokes. While painting it, he had thesea in mind; but when he was done, he lookedagain and changed the idea from sea to pool, asubject he had used in previous works. Formallyand conceptually, the shift is significant. Whilea rectangular painting called “Sea” implies a par-tial view of an uncontainable body of water, onecalled “Pool” incorporates the shape of thepainting itself. The borders of the painting areno longer part of the limited space of the mate-rial but part of the shape of the painted object.

“For me, the change is something significant,”he says. When asked whether the viewer in anart gallery will have access to this change, hecounters that “Not everything fundamental [tothe work, to the artist] is in the final art show.”

The piece then developed into two furtherpaintings incorporating a wide umber framearound a blue rectangular center, both of themcalled Pool in the Mountains.

When Paul Cézanne’s painting The Batherscomes up as part of a separate conversation, Ben-Ami points to his Pool in the Mountains and issurprised he hadn’t considered the connectionbefore. “We’re sometimes influenced by artistswithout knowing it,” he says, “by the wholehistory of art. We can be influenced by an artistwho was himself influenced by someone, andso we’re influenced by something of whichwe’re not always conscious – or don’t alwayswant to be.”

IF ONE were to put Ben-Ami on a spectrumbetween two painters, one could place himsomewhere between Los Angeles-based EdRuscha and East Coaster Philip Guston. Hisvisual vocabulary is closer to Guston’s, his think-ing method closer to Ruscha’s. His images,though, are more exact than Guston’s, more for-mally playful than Ruscha’s. But Ben-Ami does-n’t see these connections or even necessarilyagree with them. When speaking of Ruscha, herefers not to his paintings but to his black-and-white photographs of gas stations.

“The gas station is an excellent subject mat-ter,” he says, but then immediately qualifies hisstatement. “Even this is a contradiction. I cansay that a gas station is a great subject matter orI can say that you can paint anything and thatthe essence of your work will rise from there.”

This type of paradoxical or contradictorythinking imbues much of Ben-Ami’s reflection.It extends even to his notion of living and work-ing in Jerusalem. “On the one hand, I know thatevery studio, every city, every country you live

26 I N J E R U S A L E M w w w. j p o s t . c o mF R I D AY, M AY 1 , 2 0 0 9

ARTS

‘As a student, you’re already anartist, and as an artist, you neverreally finish being a student.’

– Amnon Ben-Ami

Confidence in intuition

• By DAVID STROMBERG

For painter Amnon Ben-Ami, art derives from restlessness, not from having something to say

in somehow penetrates your work. On theother hand, the geography, where I live, isnot the source of my work; it doesn’t mat-ter to me in terms of my work.”

Ben-Ami was born in Kibbutz Alumotand eventually came to Jerusalem. “I haveno patriotic feelings in regard to this city,”he says. But when he wanted to study art,he knew the only place for him was theBezalel Academy of Art and Design, fromwhich he graduated in 1986.

“As a student, you’re already an artist,”he says; “and as an artist, you never reallyfinish being a student.”

He says he had to tackle a lot of infor-mation in art school, both about art histo-ry and contemporary art, and describesbeing in contact with students andinstructors as a model art world that“shows you a little bit of who you are.”

After graduating from Bezalel, Ben-Amireceived the 1998 Ministry of Educationand Culture Prize for a Young Artist. Hewent on to show regularly in Israel andabroad, taking part in exhibitions in Seouland New York, and received a grant fromthe Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Last year,he received the Ministry of Science,Culture and Sport Prize for EncouragingArtists 35 years and older.

Ben-Ami repeatedly returns to the rela-tionship between words and shapes – theidea. It’s something that is at the core ofhis activities. He keeps notebooks inwhich he writes and sketches, and he haspublished his writing in independent pub-lications as a student and afterwards.

Hegel’s book Philosophies of Art andBeauty lies open before him, marked upwith blue pen. He is looking at the meta-physics of Hegel, who writes about artinspiring men to emotions and enlargingthe “cleavage in their feelings and pas-sions.” Ben-Ami is interested in “hisdialectics,” he says, “their constantly

changing directions, which have onemajor forward trend leading to somethingsublime.”

When asked whether he agrees that hiswork is in part conceptual, Ben-Ami isquick to differentiate between the art-historical movement of Conceptualismand the broader idea of conceptualism asit relates to humans in general. “Maybeyou feel it in me as a whole, not just asan artist, and so it surfaces when youlook at my work.” He returns to theimage of the bathroom. “If I draw a cir-cle, then it’s not a shower. But if I addsome dots, then it is.”

AGAIN, THE distinction between idea asword and idea as shape arises. “If you justhave a letter, then you don’t have the idea.But if you add some letters, a word forms.”He explains that it has happened morethan once that what’s clear to him is notclear to others. “It’s like unclear handwrit-ing.”

We turn our attention to another groupof three of his recent paintings, Brains,Brains and Noses, and Noses. Like Pool inthe Mountains, these paintings were gener-ated in an interrelated way. It started withtwo stains that Ben-Ami saw on a piece ofplastic tarp that he used as a canvas for adifferent painting. The stains remindedhim of brains, and he recreated thosestains as brains on a separate piece ofpaper. Unlike his approach to most of hispaintings, which are done quickly, hereturned to his painting three times,changing the colors and eventuallyadding a nose on either side. He thenpainted a separate piece with just twobrains, and finally a third with just threenoses.

“The body is something I’ve workedwith since Bezalel,” he says, showingimages of past works that have incorpo-

rated images of the spine, the utricle andsaccule (inner ear organs that sense equi-librium) or the lymphatic systems of thearm and foot.

“Sometimes the subject matter is a bur-den,” says Ben-Ami, “but then art is a bur-den altogether, sometimes.” He says thatone possible reason is that the main ele-ment of art is negation – a positionbetween the intellect and emotion. “It allcomes from a kind of emptiness,” he says.

The question connects to a deeper prob-lematic: What to paint. “Were the stains Isaw on that material really so successful[as brains], or was I in a state of mind thatsaid, ‘That’s fine’? You can paint realisti-cally: What you see is what you paint. ButI couldn’t stick to this problematic. I wasforced to bring in the noses. It’s a lot ofvicious circles.”

He unravels the idea further:“Formalism never stays in the formal. Thechoice of shapes and colors is not isolatedfrom non-formal questions. Maybe colorsfulfill something archaic, cultural.”

For Ben-Ami, these distinctions and rela-tions are the core of creation. “Art,whether it’s writing or painting, is thehopeless trials to designate these relationsbetween ideas and words – the substancein the most abstract sense and the fin-ished bodies on the other.”

He underscores the fact that this is not alogical position. “Making art is a behav-ior,” he says, “and movement comes fromtension or discomfort, from somethingnot being at rest.”

Half jokingly, he suggests that it’s thisrestlessness – “intellectual, psychological,emotional, it’s a mixture” – that drivespeople to make art and less the fact thatthey have something to say. “One is neversatisfied. It’s an unfinished business. Thisis how I see art-making: infinite andunsolved problematics.”

w w w. j p o s t . c o m F R I D AY M AY 1 , 2 0 0 9 I N J E R U S A L E M 27

Far left: In the case of Shower, Ben-Amiworked sometimes from a photo andsometimes from memory. ‘It isn’t clearto me which one is more immediate,’he muses.

Left: ‘The body is something I’veworked with since Bezalel,’ says Ben-Ami. ‘Sometimes the subject matter is a burden, but then art is aburden altogether, sometimes.’