Dorit Kedar, PhD

Jacob Porat – Suns, Gods and Animals

Oil and Acrylic on Paper, Tirosh Gallery, Old Jaffa

Jacob Porat is a multi-disciplinary person that amalgamates a painter, literary scholar, teacher and musician. This multiplicity is evident in his studio. His interests span over a broad sphere and the approach his takes towards his work is often associated with art history, politics and literature.

For this exhibition, I have selected paintings that are free of any immediate context. The artist connects with archetypes that are common in ancient civilizations, in the tribal existence and in the human soul, which is capable of skipping over the cultural barrier in order to land on the other side of the instincts and rowdiness inside us, where shade and light cannot be distinguished apart.

Suns: The big, hot and energetic illumination is depicted in the simplest form – an elliptic circle or a round one with infantile lines for the rays. The form may be childish, but the process is one of a very mature person. The suns fill the space of the relatively tiny paper, starring exclusively in the colorfulness that converses with the background – an identical motif endowed with a new meaning. The paint is thick, dense, layered, sealing, reflecting, playing inside-outside in the proximity between sun and background or in polarity infected with affinity.

Animals: Similarly to the suns, the animal series seems like a modern hieroglyph that translates long-gone sensations. Porat has chosen large, vegetarian, harmless animals such as a camel, a giraffe, or a deer. However, the graffiti, children-like riders are clutching weapons such as clubs and shield.

Similarly to the first series, the works toggle between imaginary childishness and high abstraction ability, between simple forms and sophisticated handling of the background. The style plays on unconscious contents of suns and animals that seem like an archetype of a big, generous mother combination with the terrible mother who swallows and kills. A longer observation borders on discomfort that results from the same combination of happiness and sadness, vitality and finiteness.

Gods and angels: This is a small, magnificent series of a winged, armless angel, a fertility goddess, also limbless – despite the emphasis on her sexual organs, and a figure that is either hanging in the air or attempting to be carrying a large geometric shape – one cannot tell.

Portraits: These too reflect the stitching together of shade and light. The Artist’s daughter is painted in monastic, brown and gray pigments concurrently with warm juicy and refreshing colorfulness. A fantastic portrait of life-death mask lies next to the artist’s portrait. Porat has painted himself as a Byzantine icon, with black, inspecting eyes from a side view. The dominant colors are red, pink and bottle green that contribute to the vigilance and the external restraint that conceal the emotional storm that takes place invisibly inside each one of us.