In Israel Feldmann's painting, magnetized by his life in Jerusalem, the manifold figures and fantasies, darkness and mystery of the place where the world began, march before our eyes. Jerusalem incessantly draws you into its incredible depth, the city keeps bursting through its own shell. Feldmann's work is the product of contemplation and solitude, that of a man facing his inner depths and the immensity of his Maker. It evinces a great intimacy with the Holy City. And I cite from memory this verse of a psalm, "In Jerusalem are all our sources to be found and in her all men are born" to bring out the density of this matter the welling up of numerous sources and the diversity of interpretation.
And so my reading of these paintings proceeds all the more freely.
These works bear witness to an expectation, an impatient patience before the mystery of the world to understand its genesis, to face up to its deformities, as this world is called on to change, to mutate, to transform.
We are exalted by the mystery of our origins and by the mystery of our future.
And so before our eyes comes this call from the hills of Jerusalem. Elsewhere, on Mount Moriah, the sacrifice of Isaac, asked of Abraham, is the supreme act of faith. Who would have imagined that these paintings would plunge us into such reflection about the meaning of our origins ?
Israel Feldmann's painting is diametrically opposed to the baroque world of illuminations and illusions. Rather, it prompts us to think of the desert as stripped to the bare essentials, yet nonetheless filled with an intense life, a murmur, invisible springs. Or space harmonious in its matter, in its very dimension, flooded with invisible words, prayers, uniting the most material and down-to-earth with the movement of feeling towards divine completeness.
Feldmann's work is also the loamy earth haunted here by a breach, there by a wall, by insurmountable heights and words layered like sediment. Like countless grottoes of words - places of the unutterable - opening and closing before us. The adventure of the world suspended, each of us embattled, yet unflinching as though the Tower of Babel has just risen in our midst.
Thus we need to immerse ourselves, deep in our souls, in meanings from the most earthly to the most spiritual.
For this navigation will take us from the flesh of our material embodiment to the very essence of the divine. It is a long, indeed perilous journey, and at every point on the horizon lies a radical solution. How else to understand the poignant and dramatic appeal inherent in this painting ?
It is the theatre of the soul, caught in its very struggle, laid bare to its very essence.
The winding pathways of Israel's imagination, his obstinate and obsessive rigor, plunge us into the struggle of Jacob and the Angel, the struggle of man with his God.
But there is a light, there is a point on the horizon and its invisible fragrance is our path, however long it may be.