His world, like mine, piles up, accumulates, fills up and compresses. It’s no wonder the word selection wasn’t his favorite term. One doesn’t select but rather amend, as much as possible, until it is necessary to stop. Which is what I do, too. His paintings are undated. The dimension of time has lost its importance. And with all due sensitivity to his personal life story, he does not create man in his own image but rather each figure is created in its own image. The love of paper and of the movement of the hand produce correspondence from the inferno, wherever it may be.

At my advanced age, after years of changing and devising worlds and styles, I have focused in recent years on creating head portraits that manifest place and time, exterior and interior, security and risk, invention and replication, organs and their substitutes. The paintings look as though produced to a formula yet at the same time chaotic and devoid of any method. In this I find a correspondence conducive to an encounter between Hofstätter and me.

Hofstätter was a relentless painter. Non-stop. His works pile up, shifting from one sheet of paper to the next, from one body to another, from one head to another. Sometimes, when one faces a multitude, it is hard to focus and see things individually. For me, this is not only a meeting with a painter who is no longer among us but an encounter with a legacy, with the shocking fact that well-known artists in Israel—some of whom were my mentors and my friends—have been almost forgotten, or at best relegated to some storage room.

Throughout my professional life I have been using sources and formal ideas that I tear out of books, pamphlets, newspapers, photographs. I collect, rummage, replicate, copy, print, rip, appropriate, magnify, distort, erase. The paintings are invented through encounters with the materials of reality and by poking around. This time, thanks to the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, I was able to poke around the Hofstätter collection. There I have performed all those actions not for the sake of my own painting but for the purpose of making a selection from his, and placing them next to mine for the purposes of acquaintance, expansion, and confrontation, and instructive proximity.

Image: Yair Garbuz, Untitled, 2022, acrylic on wood, 40×40 (photo: Daniel Hanoch)

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