Dialogue with Orit Bulgaru

Orit Bulgaru: The first thought I had upon encountering the objects in your studio has to do with the meeting point of beauty and functionality. The objects themselves—towers, domes, viewing instruments—are architectural models, perfect geometrical forms that were meticulously chosen and that demand geometric precision and balance in order to be used properly. The geometrical precision translates into a similar aesthetic of beauty and perfection. I am interested in the movement in your works between functionality and beauty. What kind of movement is that for you?

Hillel Roman: I would like to think that there is no such movement, that is, that they are one and the same. For example in “Observatory” (2009), which I presented recently at the Herzliya Biennial, I reduced my aesthetic intervention to a minimum, and most of the decisions were ostensibly functional. But then beauty pursues you relentlessly to every saw cut … Around the site of the observatory, the municipality carpenters spent several days building a wooden security railing, the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen, and, to be honest, it didn’t look like it would be such a good idea to lean on it either.

But the question in the end is, of course, is the beautiful good? All I know is that the good is beautiful, very beautiful.

All of this, of course, has to do with the world of Ideas, or the perfect Forms of imperfect objects.

The thought that the world is made in the image of something perfect, something we’ve passed by, which we are still capable of  comprehending, and that we can somehow actually try to approach—is something that constantly tickles our mind.

O.B.: The observatory, which began as a model, underscores a broader notion that you explore in your works—the space between the thing itself and the possibility of representing it.

H.R.: The model exists on a level in between the form and the thing. It designates a particular thing, but it is not in the right size, and it is not made from the right material. Given these two apparent shortcomings, it comes surprisingly close to some kind of independent formal essence. In this sense, I believe that the model is similar to painting, in that both derive their particular strength from what they relinquish (depth in painting, for example, or functionality, in the case of the model).

In the animal drawings, like the models, there is a sort of  non-material homogenization: there are no feathers, scales, fur. Everything is made out of a sort of an erased, invisible,  raw material. As though they were printed using a three-dimensional printer, and yet it is nonetheless, a painting. The drawings are an attempt to breathe life into the paper, to create an image,

O.B.: You said that the model resembles painting in terms of the strategy, because both relinquish certain dimensions of reality in order to create something new and because they frame and set a particular decision in place. I would like to talk about the way in which your charcoal drawings (“Kingdom,” 2008–2009) frame an almost scientific investigation of optical observation. There is your observation of the animals as an object of painting on the one hand, and then there is the animals’ gaze at the viewer. The drawings offer a taxonomic mapping of the animals: precise drawings that have a degree of minimalism to them. They suggest a sort of disturbing perfection. Images that are not sentient, but are nonetheless seductive (In my view they are similar to your series of oil paintings, “Occasional Goods,” 2005). The animals burst forth from a great darkness, without any explanatory context. The drawing is precise, but it does not specify a particular portrait, and in that sense the animals are universal. A row of representations. And on the other hand, the drawings look out at the viewer in a singular, unique way.

H.R.: One should also note that there is no gender. There is only one of each kind of animal, which adds a sterile dimension to the story, in contrast to Noah’s Ark, for example. This classes the animals more as figurines, and nonetheless the figurine doesn’t signify anything in particular, and it is doubtful that it can endow its owner with any power, although I definitely think they possess some sort of distant energy.

The mapping is neither systematic nor exhaustive, maybe that is my failure.

O.B.:  Can you tell me why you don’t draw human figures?

H.R.: In the series “Stronghold” (2006), I actually tried to draw people, but what came out were smeared masks, remnants of eyes. It is apparently a case of not painting the thing that interests me most of all, the thing I am incapable of giving shape to. In my charcoal drawings I draw the background, the black backdrop, and thus, out of the negative space the animals emerge. Maybe that is the way I paint the human form, through everything that it is not.

O.B.: I find that your method has an almost renaissance-like commitment to it, something of a scientific investigation. The scientific aspect is what sparks a broader intellectual examination.

H.R.: We live in an age of experts, and in that sense I am most certainly ruining everyone’s work, because I don’t do anything on the level that an expert could. Nor do I discover anything new or really invent anything. I play, and mostly I demonstrate. I test what can be done and how. In that sense, the act itself is like a model of an action. I was amazed that nowadays, through the sharing of information over the Internet, someone with no prior training can build an entire astronomical observatory—from laying the concrete foundation, through building a telescope, and up to the construction of the dome. There is an immense force here that has not yet been tapped, in my opinion. There is also something here to do with the division of labor and the alienation inherent in progress. What we have here is one person’s insistence upon doing everything, through the knowledge-sharing of amateurs instead of relying on experts, even if the result is not as “good,” not as advanced; it is something intentionally reactionary or decadent.

O.B.: The observatory marks your departure as an artist from painting and models towards a real, functional, structure. The transition in scale suddenly entails an address toward the human body. The viewer is invited to participate, to operate the model, and the space that is in the model. How does the presence of the human body change the objects for you?

H.R.: For me the observatory is an attempt to depart from pure representation toward what we call reality, in order to test this limit between art and life; where does it pass (if at all)? An attempt to map the continuum between representation and being. The issue of the body has always preoccupied me, even in terms of the format of the painting, and it is for precisely that reason that I stay away from large paintings. In any case, my paintings are made for the presence of the human body, and the same goes for my models. If anything, the space has less of  a presence when you are inside it. The prohibition art places on touching and entering in my opinion creates more presence than the permission to step in.

There is a passage by Kafka that has preoccupied me a lot over the last two years: “Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have.  When the sage says: 'Go over,' he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.  …” (Franz Kafka, On Parables, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, New York:  Schocken Books, 1947, p. 11). This passage entails a discussion about the significance of the concrete versus the metaphorical, about the human desire to get through the metaphor and to touch, the vain struggle to bridge the distance between the eye and the hand. Maybe that is the privilege of the painter/sculptor, and the source of his relevance, despite it all. In any case, I try to create objects or paintings that exist in that chasm between the concrete and the metaphorical; perhaps that is my way of trying to avoid filling any role.