About Wandering

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(From latin « errantia », the act of getting lost)

 

It all started from the wish to show what it is to be a wanderer : Human beings, walking pushed by fear, led by the hope of finding a safe place and be able to stop there, build up a new life there.

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This brought me back to the story of my family, woven from too much flights, too short rests, from Odessa to Minsk, Vilnius then Paris, New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, Los Angeles, even Harbin, and now Israel.

 

I then remembered the very old small suitcase in which my mother used to keep all the photographs of those bygone times, those strange faces yet so similar to ours, I remembered the stories my grandmother used to tell me, those stories which made their world alive again.

 

Shortly before she died, I asked my mother where the suitcase was. She said « I threw away all the pictures which couldn’t mean anything to anybody. The others are still here. » I had this sentence in my mind when I started painting this series of large-sized portraits. I wanted to spend time with them, make them alive again.

 

Here are the ones I loved, and the ones I never met but who still went weaving a few threads in my life’s canvas… So the conversation can go on.