Moshe Kassirer
Moshe Kassirer's art describes the landscape and people of the Galilee with the Olive tree as a dominant theme. Moshe strives to recapture the essence of the simple life of bygone times in Israel's Galilee region.
Moshe Kassirer was born in 1967. He lives and paints in the village of Yodfat in Northern Israel. Moshe completed his art studies at the "Tel Aviv - Avni Institute" in 1992, majoring in painting, and is also a 1997 graduate of "Tel Aviv - Camera Obscura" Film School.
In 1995 he won the "America Israel Cultural Foundation" scholarship.
Moshe was an art director in the Israeli film and television industry until April 2000 and is personally accredited with many of the exclusive advertisements of that time.
For the past five years, Moshe has been working as a graphic designer and art director for Internet web sites for prominent Israeli and international companies.
As part of the process of moving from Tel Aviv to the Galilee in August 2003, he decided to dedicate more time to painting and to make his art a way of life.
Living amongst the olive groves of the Galilee is reflected in his paintings and has provided Moshe with a source of renewed inspiration.
Moshe has exhibited his paintings in many group and solo exhibitions and his paintings have been sold to collectors both in Israel and abroad.
The Way Home
After years of involvement in the hardcore consumerism and materialism of Tel-Aviv's advertising and IT scene, Moshe Kassirer decided to rebel. He moved to Yodfat, his wife's native village, a community that offers its residents the antithesis of city life and represents a unique way of life within the human landscape of the Galilee. Moshe had embarked on his journey: The Way Home.
Artists such as Reuven Rubin and Nachum Gutman have been a source of inspiration for Moshe's work. They were considered the "Rebellious Current" of their time; renouncing the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem, they replaced Judaism with a new culture defined by Hebraic history and created the original "Land of Israel" style of painting, a style that reflected daily life in Israel, the landscape of the country and its pioneering values.
Paradoxically, the indigenous Arabs served as models for these artists, representing the primordial Israelite, a contra-type of the Diaspora urban Jew. Arabs appear in Moshe's work as well, providing models worthy of emulation, although often his Arab models undergo metamorphosis and are to be found wearing traditional Israeli caps, introducing the question of identity; "Who is the native here?" or perhaps, Moshe's yearning that Arabs and Jews might live together in simplicity.
The image of the olive tree is a dominant theme in Moshe's work, representing rootedness, longevity, survival, strength, awe; the very antithesis of transience. "I will always paint olive trees in my landscape art," Moshe says, "other trees might interfere with the monumental representation of the olive tree itself or diminish the significance of its thousand-year-old history".
Yigal Zalmona, curator of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, summarized the inclusive context of the olive tree, "The olive tree is belonging, connection to place, the Mediterranean Sea, local color, a symbol of peace, the bible, the history of our culture, politics, Israeli art, eternity…(Definition of the olive tree, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1982)".
Moshe believes that, above all, painting is about color; the harmony of colors. He uses paints straight from the tube to preserve the purity, strength and energy of the pigments. The layers of paint are scraped with a brush, as if he intends to etch these images of Nature on our minds.
This exhibit presents Moshe's landscape paintings, paintings that embody the scenery of our homeland. But there is also a longing for an ancient, perhaps even biblical way of life, the way of life sought by the pioneers who returned to the Land of Israel after an exile of two thousand years... Thus, from his point of view, The Way Home has just begun.
Shlomi Schwartzberg, Curator, November 2008
There are artists, and then there are artists who reveal the multi-leveled nature of their calling.
Moshe Kassirer is one of these, an artist intent on capturing nuances of the Galilean way of life, focused on its olive groves, or to be more precise, olive tableaus. Kassirer's images undergo a complex process, involving photography and digital dismantling and reassembly, before finally appearing on canvass (in oil).
Kassirer's awareness of his roots, and of his debt to early Israeli artists, is evident throughout his work, and his "Rosh Hashanah 2007" is actually an homage to Reuven Rubin's 1970's painting "Pomegranates on my Window" (on display at the Rubin Museum), while creating a dialogue with Van Gogh's 1889 San Remy olive trees as well. Kassirer, differing from Van Gogh, emphasizes sunbeams and heat, penetrating Galilee's soil and emanating from it, the sun as the vital source that generates Israel's olives.
The multi-leveled nature of the paintings manifests, first of all, in the layers of paint, witnessing Kassirer's respect for his materials, resulting in bountiful, multi-faceted, ever-changing works of art. The many layers create paintings that seem illuminated from within, shimmering, vibrant. Kassirer's art has to be seen face-to face. Newspaper photos, websites, or exhibit catalogues may serve to remind us of paintings we've seen, but lack the multi-dimensionality bursting from these canvasses, a feature that cannot be conveyed by two-dimensional media reproductions.
Copious layers of paint are not the only evidence of the multi-dimensional quality of Kassirer's work, which portrays numerous dimensions of interpretation as well, both overt and concealed, some of which are revealed by observing a certain painting, and others which come to light only after viewing the exhibit as a whole.
As stated, Kassirer's art deals mainly with olive trees, so if we reduce all his trees, as if by algebraic equation, what we have left are ladders, lambs, sheep and a bicycle, not to mention the farmers harvesting the olives, whom we'll relate to later.
A ladder standing on its own immediately brings to mind THE ladder of Jewish tradition; Jacob's ladder, angels ascending and descending, the only occurrence of the word "ladder" in the Old Testament, where God appeared to Jacob and repeated His promise to bequeath the Land of Israel to his descendants, "I am with thee, and will keep thee whithersoever thou goest, and will bring thee back into this land…" (Gen 28:15). In other words, there is a linkage between the land and its ownership and the presence of the ladder.
Ladders as well as lambs are to be found in the Jewish art of Marc Chagall, whose work is charged with Jewish symbolism. Kassirer chose "Maketh Peace on High Places" as the name for his lamb painting. Anyone familiar with the biblical story of the scapegoat sacrificial offering cannot help but ponder the identity of the lamb that must be sacrificed before that longed-for peace is achieved.
Looking at the olive tree in terms of national identity and self-determination raises questions as to the identity of the farmer in Kassirer's art; he looks like an Arab, but he's wearing the distinctive blue cap of the Zionist pioneers. Is Kassirer telling us that Arab farmers were the real pioneers? Are they still? And does this imply that the Jews are no longer interested in olives or land or their homeland?
Shoshi Norman, Curator, 2008
View Moshe's art
