Factory yards, building sites, scrap metal dumps, containers and lorries, metal pipes and planks.
Oded Zaidel paints the back side of the urban landscape: not scenes of nature nor scenes of the "cultured" town, but areas on the margin; neglected corners whose presence we pass by almost without noticing. The painting is almost always based on photographs which he took and which serve him as an initial sketch. In the course of the work the components in the photograph break apart and are reconstructed - details of the scenery become blurred, parts of them disappear until sometimes there remains only a loose connection between the painting and the photograph which was his starting point.
All the paintings are empty of both people and animals. From this standpoint it is possible to see in Oded`s paintings the backbone from which they derive in unique ways, the empty and frightening pictures of the town by the Italian De Chirico and the pictures of empty spaces with a similar division of the area by the American, Hopper, who once said - "I've always been intrigued by an empty room… what a room looked like when there was nobody to see it, nobody looking in. In an empty room absence suggest presence." In Oded Zaidel`s pictures there is not alienation. The absent person is present; the lorry, the tractor, the crane, and the light in the window all bear witness to man`s existence and presence in the space.In this regard it is possible to go back fifty years to the paintings of agricultural implements done by Avraham Ofek on the kibbutz - always devoid of people .
The scrap metal as the subject in some of the pictures and the reliance on photographs bring to mind Larry Abramson`s works of piles of junk .The arbitrary and apparently random choice of subjects turns the painting itself into the subject and leads the viewer to focus on the language of the painting, on the structure on the colorfulness, on the division of space and on how the picture operates .
In Oded`s paintings there is warmth, solid earth, sky, daylight, and torchlight at night. But we are not talking here of pastoral scenery, rather of places of building and activity whose enchantment is overlaid with dynamism and surprises just as in the artistic creation itself.
To put it concisely, by spreading rich color he creates uniform surfaces of color. In daytime paintings the colors are bright and dazzling and seem to be full of their power to the extent that it is possible to sense the heat that exudes from the exhaust pipes of the bulldozers and forklifts. In the night time paintings the torches give light and provide dramatic light from the wall of a building , from a door , or a window and darkness covers the dust, the weary watchman inside, the debris and the tar stained earth .
Oded Zaidel lives and works in Jerusalem. In 1987 he graduated from the Graphic Design department in Bezalel. Since 2005 he has been a member of the collective gallery, 'Agripas 12'. In 2006 he was the guest artist at the Jerusalem Print Workshop. Solo exhibitions: 'Sand, gravel and cement', at the 'Al Hatzuk Gallery', Netanya (2006) and 'Landscapepainting' at Agripas 12 Gallery, Jerusalem (2005). He participated in group exhibitions, among them: 'Traces', The third Bienalle for drawing in Israel, Agripas 12 Gallery, Jerusalem (2008). 'The Desert generation', The Artists House, Jerusalem; 'Ha'kibbutz Israeli Art Gallery', Tel Aviv (2007). The Fifth international Biennale for drawing, Pilzen, the Czech Republic (2006). New Members, The Artists House, Jerusalem (2005). ' Edge', Agripas 12 Gallery (2005).
