Ideological crematorium

Evyatar Stern displays here a selection of current works. Stern’s artistic journey included an emphasis on personal, ideological, and psychological structures. In Paris, he began to develop a nearly obsessive concern for memory (crisis and apocalyptic memory), translating the Holocaust into his work, where leaving Israel for Paris meant delving deeper into the logical and irrational remnants of the War in Lebanon. In his current work, he entitled the “crematorium,” Stern delves into the basic meaning of the word. Israel’s biological search for survival has been dropped; the “here and now” of Israel has disappeared in favor of apocalyptic, subconscious, and universal rendering of those two words.

The “crematorium” appears through direct artistic rendering of both subconscious and psychological concerns, into black and white, as an implied three-dimensional object, or, at times, as a memory that is brought to life in the mind but not actually seen. A second and dominant element in Stern’s work is the path leading to the crematorium. This path, invented by Stern, whose introduction of it is a form of outside interference and philosophically investigating the unity of the road to the crematorium, never really existed. It was a mythical path, an incomprehensible phantom, and in multiple pieces it appears as an abstract geometric form. The vivid combination of colors, interference and enjoyment, are leveled together and lead to the empty chair which, although constructive of form, is not meant for sitting.

In his current works, Stern repudiates his proven talent for creating sculpture that may be considered “pretty” or “aesthetic.” Rather, he deliberately produces a virtually impoverished sculptural means, meaning he imparts to the work by the use of irrelevant historical and contemporary artistic content. The metal shelf pieces, made of an iron construction painted gray on which four shelves covered in artificial grass are placed, are derived from the geometric ascent of the crematorium smokestack. The path is implied in vertical and given volume; on the surface an object covered in wax shaped something like the smokestack and the next is an object of carved wax concealing an illegible text. The upper shelf is paradoxically covered in green.

In the video table, Stern sets out a personal journey creating an audio-visual manipulation based on scenes and elements from documentary films to which a mechanical soundtrack has been added, drawing the viewer into the artist’s associative world. On the plastic grass covering the work table, beneath the layer of identical Xerox reproductions of the crematorium, the artificial path reminiscent of photographs of the extermination camps appears. The geometric path, scaled across, the triangular figure on the wooden work table. On the surface of all three works is a spread base and sense of pain, which today are paradoxically covered in green.

On the plastic grass table with the memories of the second generation, the major key to understanding his work: Stern, who used artistic means to recycle items from his own autobiography. Yet unlike Beuys, who used wax in his work to recall Joseph Beuys, Stern fills the wooden table with the memories of the second generation, linking personal biography to universal tragedy.