W.T.C: Concrete Abstract
© Shai Kremer
Images where different points of view gather and amalgamate, where time folds in layers, where memories and repetitions of past and future intertwine. Imbued with time and memories, the works of the series Concrete Abstract, by the Israeli artist Kremer, are the result of a long process of work, born with the documentation of the reconstruction of the World Trade Center’s site, where the Twin Towers collapsed tragically in September 2001.
Each image, in fact, contains over 80 overlapped photos, which were taken by the author over time and combined, day after day, preserving the overall power of details. Thanks to this operation – where the durability and the strength of memory stand against the mere flow of events destined to oblivion – his works look like a restless device, stretched between centrifugal and centripetal impulses, between chaos and order, between fragmentation and structuring of space.
Like nets, like an invisible suspended maze, his images may remind us of “pictorial dynamism” and the dynamic tension which is typical of the Futurists. With Kremer, however, the vitality and the polyphonic simultaneity, found in the works of the Futurists, turn into an impersonal machine, which is powerful, dramatic and lacking univocal directions at the very same time. The city does not grow towards a bright future anymore (like in the famous work by Umberto Boccioni), but struggles through destruction, accumulation and continuous reconstruction. After having investigated the debris and the ruins, both ancient and contemporary, which painfully mark the Israeli landscape (like in his previous work Fallen Empires and Infected Landscape), Kremer creates, with Concrete Abstract, images, which become gloomy and disturbing metaphors of modernity. Based on shared presence and interferences, on correspondences, on multiple meanings, his works fight against the logic of fundamentalism from inside, since it is based on a sole truth, on a purity lacking any mix-up, on a rigid and indisputable division between right and wrong, true and false. Reality is not univocal – as we are reminded through the works of Kremer – but it is an intertwining of many different truths and points of view.
Photolux Festival Catalog,
Curator text: Gigliola Foschi
click to view the complete set of images in the archive