Ronit Keret

Ronit Keret
A QUESTION OF THE HUMAN CONDITION

Ronit Keret, Born in Jerusalem, Lives, and works in Haifa and Tel Aviv.
Keret has graduated from Hamidrasha Beit-Berl College of Art (2005-2009) and has a MA in Arts Education, at Leeds University, England (1998-2001).

In recent years, Keret, a multidisciplinary artist, is mainly engaged in site-specific installations and video-art.

Her work deals with the ecological crisis, such as the melting glaciers that have been changing due to the nature of the human activity that abuses earth’s natural resources. The nature of the material used varies, and Keret focuses on industrial waste such as packaging (Styrofoam, cardboard, etc.) and other industrial compounds.
In her works, Keret describes the transitions between good and evil in looking at human and nature relations and the gap between childhood dreams and catastrophic reality.

Late-night visions provide the source for most of my work. The oscillation between the conscious and unconscious; the quest for novel and alternative worlds and the unraveling of the connections between them; the marriage of the imaginative and the autobiographical – it all nourishes my sculptures, installations, paintings, and lately, also my video pieces, and create a meditative and aesthetic experience.

The paintings range from the figurative to the abstract. The abstract works are embedded with fields of monochromatic colors that range from greys to deep blues, from crystal greens to intense ocher.
This almost-corporal expressionist, as well as transparent and lucid paintings, aims to capture painting’s overwhelming power as an act in the world. The recognizable forms and images that emerge or flicker through the layers of colors suggest the artistic struggle between representation and abstraction, between restraint and freedom, between the legible and the illegible.

The figurative paintings are flooded with ladders, tubes, strange monstrous creatures, symbolic landscapes that seek to bridge the world below with the world above while facing fragile human existence.
The ladders tend to break, crumble and drown in the sea; the tubes remain sealed and clogged, the creatures are entangled within themselves, and the icy landscapes are slippery.

The sculptures and installations are a follow-up and an embodiment of the paintings.
They are made of scraps of white Styrofoam packaging that have been tossed in the garbage after completing their original mission. I collect them and give them a new life, recycling them into large scale installations and into separate smaller sculptures. Styrofoam is the emblematic artificial human-made non-biodegradable material.
It is anti-sculptural in essence because of its non-elasticity, its tendency to break down into endless parts, and its textural surface.
The usage of white Styrofoam creates in my sculptures a stillness and a sense of the sublime as well as movement and possible disintegration at any given moment.
They resonate geometrical-architectural forms as well as the human body while dealing with the whole and the fragments coinciding.

The sculptures are Neo Futuristic intertwining archaic primordial motifs. Thus, through matter and form, the sculptures bring up questions regarding human condition vis-à-vis nature and in nature. These issues evolve into great orchestrations in the three installations – Fire, After All, Tears – and the videos that follow.
These works have evolved out of the sculptures to create grand environments that force the spectator to face the catastrophic effect that man has on nature. They also are a place of fantasy, both threatening and appealing.

Read the full article on Art Market Magazine Issue #50