November 10, 2008
Mari Spirito - When I saw your paintings, last spring, I immediately connected to them in an intuitive way, with my heart first, then with my mind. Is that the effect you are striving for?
Shai Azoulay - Mari, great to skype! I think that the more I'm doing paintings I feel that the only thing that gives me the reason to paint is that it comes from a very simple, warm place in my heart. I learned so much about art and the history of art that it got to the point that I wanted to forget all of that and to get to the "starting point," the moment of the beginning...I feel that most of the art that I see is trying to "think" and not to trust and use the simple instinct, and painting in this time can move only by the use of color, the life of the mix of color.
ms - Stephan Harrod Buhner wrote a great book called "The Secret Teachings of Plants, the Intelligence of the Heart in Direct Perception of Nature" that describes the human heart as our main organ for perception and communication - and the brain as our secondary organ. Is this what you are talking about?
sa - Yes, in some ways the brain is cold and the heart is warm. You have to find a way to use each one at the right time. When I’m painting, I have a plan for 70% of the painting. I'm trying to give myself the space that will bring some things that I didn't plan to see or do in the other 30%.
ms- In the most direct way, I see your work being about the human experience, an artist in the studio, a person alone in a room struggling with himself and his ideas... how much of these elements do you feel become political comments?
sa- It is about the human experience!!! And the place of me as an artist in doing something that will bring good things to the world. The only way to do that is by using the heart. We are all living in a box like the artist in the studio, and I can choose to take the way of doing more then showing my dark side and to look for the light side.
ms- A friend just sent me the link to the brawl that broke out between Armenian and Greek Orthodox in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, "revered as the site of Jesus' crucifixion, burial and resurrection." I'm not surprised to hear that the monks were actually fighting in Jerusalem’s Old City; the tension is quite heavy. Is this tension that makes it way into your work?
sa - Yes...the tension is a very important element in my work. The tension between silence and loudness, or low and high, it gives to the work the reason to be looked at, and it is a reflection of my life in a way.
ms - Have you always been a figurative painter? What work led to this?
sa - No, I used different styles of painting until I found what comes to me easily.
ms - In "Dream" I see the paint drips, that have become little figures, as agents of your non-conscious mind, am I far off?
sa - I made this non-conscious in a very conscious way, trying to walk on the extreme of how a drip of color becomes a figure, the moment that nothing becomes something.
ms - What's coming up for you?
sa - I'm going to take part in a show of Israeli art in Rome in December, and in a show about Jerusalem in Jerusalem’s Artist House and another one at Artists Space in New York, in September, 2009.
ms - One last thing: can you tell me your reaction when you learned the news about president elect Barack Obama?
sa - Barack Obama, I'm thinking all the time: this man is real??? I hope that he is and if so, it is going to be very interesting, and smell of a fresh thing!
This interview took place via skype on the occasion of Shai Azoulay’s participation in the group show, Psychology of a Pawn, curated by Mari Spirito at Participant, Inc., New York.