YIFTAH PELED
REVIEWS
Texts & Press
TEXTS ABOUT THE ARTIST PRODUCTION
ANANDA CARVALHO
Individual Exhibition, Art Museum of Espirito Santo - MAES - Yiftah Peled
2021
"This reference contextualizing Brazilian art is meant to observe that a large part of Peled's production proposes to change the condition of the visitor from the “spectator” that contemplates a finished work to the “participant” that activates the construction of the work as an event. That is: the experiments elaborated by the artist are always open and in motion, presenting sparks that complexify and problematize the participative act. Between “tendency” and “chance”, the works present in this exhibition make it possible to share different perspectives according to the participation options chosen by the audience. Spaceships/Driften Game demands that people look up and into the corners of the exhibition space to find images of hidden spaceships; in Death of the Dog people can put their heads inside a cavity in the installation; Above the Eyes invites the participant to perform, in a dark room, over a stage surrounded by televisions that show images and sounds of an amusement park. The propositions presented here provoke the spectator and depend on how each person might be willing to experience them. Thus, they can be read as an event, insofar as their poetics are modified based on the dialogical relationships established by each visitor. "
DIEGO MATOS
Gallery Circuit, Curitiba Biennial - Yiftah Peled Individual Exhibition review, Galeria Ybakatu
2019
"Caetano Veloso, one of our greatest artists, has already sung:“ here everything seems to be still under construction and is already a ruin ”.it is actually a quote from Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was here and later wrote the book “Tristes Trópicos”.
This idea seems to be a good starting point to talk about the artistic production of the Israeli Yiftah Peled (Tivon, 1964). Based in Brazil since 1991, he presents an accurate critical perspective and artistic to face the complex local reality - a context of peripheral and unfinished modernity in which the new and the ruin cross and the destruction and the reinvention are faces of the same coin. Such perception is given face to face, for example, with the film Involuntary monuments (2012), work that synthesizes the urban condition of a place like Vitória (ES). "
"Among so many, if there is an artist active in Brazil who can have his production framed as environmental poetics, it is Yiftah Peled. This characterization has already been too stigmatized when we refer to local art, but it gains another power of meaning when identified in the work. For example, in “Definitive Tourism / Rio” (2015), Peled gives body scale to the figure of Christ the Redeemer - the one who seems to be watching over Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro - and offers it to the public's participatory embrace. climbing is the initial gesture of work, which is only accomplished in full by the participation of the other. "
"In fact, the estrangement from the places where he lived, while illustrating a certain foreignness, also makes the artist observe the environment around him without the historical burden of belonging, but with a genuine desire to be welcomed or, better, to be able to turn ruin into a new form of construction.
"Peled invites us to think about what is palpable and what can immediately involve us, calling everyone to a new environmental, social and aesthetic responsibility. For this reason, the question-provocation makes sense and gains a state of emergency: the dreams of whom we are dreaming?"
LORENZO MAMMI
O que Resta: Arte e Crítica de Arte. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
2012
"Another work composed by a metal cross with arms of equal length vaguely reminds one the face of a clock. At the extreme of each arm, there is a photo of a naked body seen from the back, erect, which seems to be ready to enter in the rollers of a car wash. The bodies ideally extend the structures of the cross. From afar it is almost reduced to a line. Therefore, the presence of the human figure insinuates in the geometric structure, a light nervousness, like repressed violence in the abstraction, which the naked body, in contrast,
unveils, there are other signs of tension, the cross is supported on the wall only by its extremes and comes forward a bit at the center, forming an arc. The photos are also obliquely supported on the wall, only on the exterior side, while the opposite side is placed over the ends of the cross without touching them.
The whole work seems to need the effort to maintain itself in position. Finally, the rollers of the car wash, if on one side, remit to a cleaning process, calling attention to the skin of the body, on the other side, suggests a frontal rotating movement, contradictory in relation to the lines of force in the work.
Again, the simple threat of an action puts in danger the integrity of the idea( in the etymological sense of the term: mental form). But in this danger, there is also the weight, it's pregnancy. Situated itself between the cross and the wall, between the work and the world, the human figure is almost reduced to a graphic signal, doesn’t move, doesn’t make a gesture. but possesses an interior, at least virtually, and this interior could always create a movement. That is enough for the whole work, in the mind of the observer, it goes out of the axel, threatening a disequilibrium. We, the bodies, are the germs that threaten the purity of the ideas, at least virtually, and this interior could always create a movement. That is enough for the whole work, in the mind of the observer, it goes out of the axel, threatening a disequilibrium. We, the bodies, are the germs that threaten the purity of the ideas.
PAULO REIS
Corpo na cidade: performance em Curitiba
2010
"In the project" Escultura Publica (1992) the artist's work unfolded in three interconnected moments. First performance of construction of ephemeral sculpture in the square of the flower watch, by the artist and Eduardo Gerken, with wood and clay. In the second moment, with the sale of the sculpture to Galeria Casa da Imagem, the artist bought 56 pairs of shoes that were distributed to paper pickers. The last action was to install posters with the frase: " Think about your thoughts?", in the center of the city."
TADEU CHIARELLI
Catálogo Panorama de arte Brasileira MAM São Paulo
1999
"Being able to think of sculpture and art in public spaces, through the documentation of Yiftah peled's performances in Curitiba and Florianopolis (presented in an intimate way in this panorama, following the artist's express designation), seems to be another very opportune element for the demonstration of the overflow that artistic modalities have suffered in the last few years. Is sculpture, performance, literature, what makes peled?
In fact - and fortunately - this issue is overcome by the artist's own attitude towards reality and the reality of the art that surrounds him."
REGINA MELIM
Catálogo Panorama de arte Brasileira MAM São Paulo
1999
“His internal process becomes more concrete because he goes through this loss of reference and becomes the driving force of all his work. Thus, allowing contamination, this fragile body becomes a body that evokes confrontation by living this experience as the possibility of creating an expressive and unique language. ”
“The artist intervenes in the urban space only as a staging gesture for the construction of a work because, when Yiftah subverts the relations of scale of exteriority and distance, symbols of power. It also creates a space for each body to penetrate there and become the link in the composition of the work. ”
“The documentation of his urban interventions serve to point out a territory of organicities and virtualities of the body, signaling differences and power relations. When he approaches and intervenes, it is a way that he finds himself imposing himself as an organism but pointing out in this duality a provisional character because when they touch and expand. ”
PAULO REIS
Catálogo de exposição no Museu de Arte de Londrina
1994
"Yiftah's work uses vegetal elements, pieces collected in deposits, objects, in a post-industrial archeology without excavations. Urban fossils, with their memories inscribed in them, found in the skin of the world.
Its materials compose multidimensional relationships, conversations, confrontations. In each of his sculptures we have a clash of physical bodies creating a virtual body of meanings. Territorializations of the unheard of.
There is a balance, which pulsates and breathes, of all the vectors in the environment - potentialities of an apparently motionless axis that revolves rapidly around itself.
Our contemporary gaze, with its stories, traverses solid bodies and, more than them, its intervals. Absences moving plants of senses. We walk steps of creation, other big-bangs, games of the mind, quasi-epiphanies. "
PAULO HERKENHOFF
Catálogo de exposição Individual na Galeria Casa da Imagem, Curitiba
1993
The Presence of Yiftah Peled in Curitiba, a city with no significant tradition in sculpture, reveals the possibilities of the modern international displacement of artists.
Yiftah is not involved with the possibilities of exotism, a Brazilian region kept apart as a reserve of difference for many curators and artists from the northern hemisphere. His movement is different. His work has been a decisive contribution. quickly integrated into the recent cultural process of constitution of a place for contemporary art in Curitiba, In this Brazilian period. Yiftah Peleds production is characterized by its trend towards the dissolution of the Sculpture body.
"In Yiftah Peled's wor, the role of the bodies seems to be the role of creating an apparent paradox: to print the movement. With the location of the object in space, his work performs displacement from the center. The observer's attention meets these points (objects) and faces the dispersion of the body. "
"In another piece of art - the gallery corridor the walls are pierced by holes, a real trauma in the body. This piece of art, that is to say, space, goes beyond its architectural characteristic to become a body art that is pierced by the spectator. This being through, and not in front of a piece of art, more than a change of adverb changes the syntax of the space itself in that piece of art."