Vertigo / Prof’ Uri Katz

“Where there are no men, be a man”, a quasi-quote and yet although words are lost to the prostitutioning of language, reflecting the spaces and emptiness we are drowning in, we can not for as long as we breath, but try once and again to put thoughts into verbal expression, that is to say in words. Others put in images, or music. The search for truths will continue, and is embodied in the language, and what is language said Nietzsche once upon a time, but “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms – in short, a summary of human relations enlarged, copied and decorated with poetic and rhetoric ornaments, and after extended usage appear to a certain nation to be firm, canonic and compelling: truths are illusions that man forgot their true character”.

I try to figure out and decipher Shai Saul’s camera-made works, and find a quest for minimalism perhaps, abstract, deconstruction of construction, or in other words, an attempt to reach the kernel of experience. We must not mistake the weight and density. This requires navigating and Saul refuses to give us a compass. He requires the observers to take an active part, decode the works and figure out their meaning on their own: vertigo. It is possible to hear the sound escorting the images, the hard and flexible cement iron. Saul is searching for the value add, for the essence that charges content and meaning upon an object placed in its physical and human surroundings, an essence for which ethics and aesthetics will compliment each other rather than obscure one another, an essence accompanied by responsibility, bilateralism and commitment.

Saul’s poetic quotes reflect criticism towards the abolition and brutality raging around us; almost all of which are man-made, the results of mankind’s desires that leaves behind seemingly rural villas, the make belief of pastoral red shingle roofs (nothing is missing) bordering a jail’s painted wall (that will be perceived differently tomorrow) that tears the landscape apart and imprisons the sight and the soul.

What is the power of a word, what is the strength of a metaphor? Is it all an illusion, and are we the observers? There is a statement here, and if that statement brings us to a halt, be it even for a minute or for a passing awakening, it has already done something. Let it be.

Tel Aviv, 2006