David Ben White
By ANNE
SASSOON
David Ben While, installation shot, details to follow
No. 12 is an unoccupied Tel
Aviv penthouse, still filled with the rich lives of its past owners
- Sarah, a Berlin-trained psychiatrist, born nearly 100 years ago in
Palestine, and her flamboyant husband Bandi, who designed the building.
The flat is as it was left, with its fine books, grand piano, paintings
by Bandi and their famous friends, simple family kitchen and bedroom,
occupied for years by Sarah on her own, and the plant-filled balcony
with its views of a changing Tel Aviv. For many decades this flat was
the heart of their large and closely connected family.
London-based artist David
Ben White has created an installation of family portraits in the flat,
which seem to inhabit another layer of experience without causing interruption
or disrespect to the flat's original narrative. Using a blend of dripped
ink and collaged cutouts to offset his descriptive style, White has
based his portraits on closeup photographs of the extended family, simplifying
them on the computer, and coming up with a series of strong, painterly
images which themselves manage to work on different levels at the same
time. These strong, deconstructed faces, glossy black and garish colours
on crisp white board, are pasted above, below and in front of the Sarah/Bandi
experience, most of them pegged on to lines strung across the balcony
where they bob in the breeze like laundry. Because White is a liked
and trusted family friend, the faces tend to smile amiably, but the
smiles and personalities of White's subjects are subsumed by his own
celebrative and investigative energy. The work of artists as disparate
as Boltanski, Calder and Bacon come to mind; intended as a homage to
a family, more than that it is a homage to painting.
The exhibition includes a
video loop which shows the work as seen at different times of the day
and night.
Anne Sassoon
is an artist living in Jerusalem
