About

Israel Cohen (born 1953, Jaffa, Israel), is a multidisciplinary artist, who focuses on painting, sculpture and objects in a mixed technique, using a variety of materials and objects that he gathers from his immediate environment, such as wooden boards,

industrial materials as stainless steel, tin, copper, stones, dried fish, cement, sand and various ready-made objects.

 

His work, ranging from the conceptual to the figurative, presents a unique language revolving around existential human issues, inner being, traditions and cultural symbols anchored in the history and heritage originating from the island of Djerba, Tunisia. It crosses between ancient North African aesthetics and Mediterranean aesthetics, with a contemporary interpretation of a creator who traces an ancient past that resonates in the veins of his soul, as a cultural DNA that finds its expression in his conceptual-creative course.

 

Cohen highlights a cultural tradition that transcends time and eras, as an archaeologist uncovering historical-cultural layers. He makes use of folkloristic symbols. His work reflects an attraction to ritual and mystical motifs and elements associated with North African culture and traditions in general and the island of Djerba in particular. The artist examines the symbols from a new, dual, sometimes distant point of view, dismantles and rebuilds them and poses questions about their relevance. His works maintain an interesting and complex dialogue with history, while creating a contemporary language. They create unexpected connections and merge the personal and the universal, criticism and humor while forming a statement about the essence of the image and its status in contemporary art and society.

 

Cohen's starting point is intuitive and emotional. His works are characterized by a raw, primal, unpolished look and are mainly monochromatic in color. His visual language moves on the seam line between art and craftsmanship, between the historical and folkloristic and the contemporary. He blurs the boundaries between the low and the high, between the visible and the hidden and examines the interrelationship between the mundane, the traditional and the mythological.