My Friend Hitler

The present exhibition brings into light Dov Or-Ner's both revengeful and provocative concern with the figure of Adolph Hitler as a mean to face the shadow of the horror that leads along with his life.

It is also a testimony of Or-Ner's loyalty to the path he followed since the late 60's, as a conceptual artist committed with a posture that awakes controversy, political and social discourse, and questions the role played by the arts in shaping both the personal and the collective consciousness.

A posture expressed then by making an art that broke with conventions, and is revealed now in the title My friend Hitler that accompanies the series of color drawings here at show.

The title of the exhibition contains a combination of words that sounds antagonistic and contradictory, unless is understood within a context of bitter irony. My friend Hitler inspires an ambivalence that can be considered as well as analogous to the disparity between the terrible contents inevitable linked to Hitler, and the deep aesthetic sensibility that characterizes both the design of the figures and the colorfulness of the works.

Dov Or-Ner, from the series, My friend Hitler, 2005. Color pencils on paper, 32 x 26.5 cm.

One hundred pencil color drawings -yellow, red, and blue- on white paper of 32 x 26.5 cm, are arranged in rows annexed to one another on one wall of the gallery.

In each one of them, one yellow figure, is represented by means of a simplification that enhances her main features and character. As a whole, the wall presents itself like one huge comics in basic colors that inspires dynamism, vitality and sense of humor, at the time that invites the beholder to follow the works according to an order that justifies some kind of narrative.

But the lightness and joyfulness that go together with the first impression, are soon replaced by ambivalent feelings at the moment of seeing the figure with the moustache reinforcing its evil presence by appearing hundred times on the wall. A revengeful curiosity mixed with both pleasure and repulse, leads us to discern the deformations in the figure's body, her obscene postures, neurotic manners, decadent garments and environment, that show Hitler as androgynous and pathetic, emotionally disordered, victim of his own madness and sexual anxieties.

Hitler as a figure that resembles and brings to mind, some times Egon Schiele's expressionist self images, and some times pornographic caricatures.

This series of pencil color drawings are escorted by a dialogue that Hitler maintains with himself; a Dadaist text Or-Ner wrote inspired perhaps by the absurd sense of humor that characterizes Alfred Jarry's monologues of Pere Ubu or Ubu Roi.

On the opposite side of the gallery, a video movie shows on loops a soft red Hitler doll, particularly amorphous though shaped according to the geometric formula of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitrubian Man, being thrawed time after time, loosing its shape and identity; and becoming, like the hitlers in the drawings, an object of abuse.

Dov Or-Ner, from the series, My friend Hitler, 2005. Color pencils on paper, 32 x 26.5 cm.

This exhibition comes as a chain link that adheres to other two earlier exhibitions in which Or-Ner worked in collaboration with Josian Va'anunu, and that showed these two artists both meaningful and disturbing concern with the image of the dictator: the installation Jesslin Fax in its two chapters (2000 and 20004) in the Museum in Ein Harod, in which a Hitler portrait was included among other portraits of 20th Century personalities; and, A Question of Disagreement, which took place in March 2006 at the Pyramid Gallery in Haifa where the works of 14 artists were shown, and among them, six decorative floral paintings by Hitler printed on canvas.

Those two exhibitions carried on mainly a conceptual character, and enhanced a renewed discourse regarding paradoxical identity, taboos vs. general agreement, and the historical and moral context within which the aesthetic values of a work of art are considered.

But in regarding the drawings, we must refer to this exhibition as related also to other series of works made with one three-colors pencil, such as Leonardo's bicycle trip to a beautiful-mad world, from 2002; Little Murders and Only the Dead Won't Die, both from 2003; and Have You Ever Considered Suicide? from 2004; series developed along with the pages of the Diary Painting in which Or-Ner leaves day after day, since 1998, the impressions of the day before, in a kind of constant existentialist dialogue with time.

Dov Or-Ner, from the series, My friend Hitler, 2005. Color pencils on paper, 32 x 26.5 cm.

In a certain way, color pencils are associated with personal and intimate draft making, with a tendency towards humble simplicity of the means of expression that goes beyond the concept of Arte Povera. In a peculiar and more nostalgic sense, color pencils are also identified with childhood in times before those were replaced by crayons and markers (more in accord with children's needs for immediate satisfaction).

Or-Ner decision to adopt color pencils technique almost as a statement of an aesthetic approach for his work during the last years, has a special personal meaning in the case of the series My friend Hitler. The works are linked to those drawings Dov made along his adolescent years in the Catholic monastery in the south of France, where he and his brother arrived and survived the Holocaust, after being separated from their parents who eventually perished in Auschwitz as the rest of the family did. In the monastery, Dov used to draw with color pencils mostly comics of Tarzan. He made some magazines that he used to interchange with other children for stamps he collected.

By drawing with color pencils, as a technique linked to the comics, that allows him to create a pictorial language who's communicative power is examined in the framework of his adolescence in the monastery, Or-Ner is closing circles juxtaposing periods of his life. The erotic contents that stand as a predominant expressive component in My friend Hitler, also reveal issues that male adolescents are concerned with.

This is a pictorial language by means of which you can make a loved or admired figure into a hero, or rather to defeat a rival or an enemy by making him into an anti-hero, or a mockery caricature.

With My friend Hitler, Dov Or-Ner seems to close the distances of time, revenging a legitimate revenge in 'real time', representing Hitler by means of that expressionism he hated so much, and using art as the only weapon that then, as well as today, was at him available.

Judit Kriwisky