Eli Petel: The South Pole

One trip south, to the memorial sites of the most recent war, produced a photograph that became the ground and backdrop for Eli Petel’s new exhibition, The South Pole. In the GT Center complex, on Baaley HaMelakha Street in Netivot stands the gallery of Eliran Galili. The rectangular building, with its long display window, looks like a pavilion designed by unruly students of Le Corbusier. In fact, it is a shipping container that was dropped into the vast commercial complex. Its glass facade reveals the gallery wall, lined with pictures: alongside colorful paintings of intimate jazz performances appear portraits of the Baba Sali, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The figure of Rabbi Yoram Abergel of Netivot leans against the glass wall from the outside.

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In the painting of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a highly meaningful inversion takes place, opening a tunnel of time, consciousness, and space that leads to Petel’s well-known “Negative Portrait” (2002). The rabbi’s portrait is painted in negative: his face is black, his clothing and head covering are white, as are his dark sunglasses, in a kind of pop twist that is both decorative and forceful. Petel’s “Negative Portrait” was a pseudo-negative that concealed behind it the labor of makeup and disguise: a self-portrait photographed after the artist darkened his face and bleached his hair as an inversion of the photographic negative process. Poles meet and reverse as if they had never been anything but reflections of themselves.

 

Transposing the transparent wall in Netivot to the opaque wall of a Tel Aviv gallery is more or less a negative self–blackface. Behind “Bread and Roses,” the metropolitan gallery, stand associations that support working class women. The gallery wall in Netivot—a working-class peripheral town—bears Western tokens such as the modernist pavilion-like appearance and the pop paintings that, in turn, point to different and competing groups within Haredi society. Petel’s photograph of the Netivot gallery, enlarged, becomes the surface on which his works from the past two years hang. Some of them are minimalist and post-minimalist objects tainted with sacrilege: they are identitarian, decorative, and narrative. For example, falling canvases splattered with acrylic paint might evoke spray-painting on walls, abstract expressionist splatters, or a bold punk color scheme. The twisting tunnel of time-consciousness also leads to paintings of rabbis that Petel himself painted following Galili—the Baba Sali and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, one mystical and the other halakhic, one fluid and the other negative.

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​Petel’s use of the southern gallery image as the ground for his works generates several connections and intersections: while the gallery in Netivot addresses the local audience, presenting its heroes side by side, as a move that is at once artistic, devotional, religious, and commercial, Petel has for years been engaging with the same signifiers, but from a different perspective—from a distance, as an exploratory stance centered on artistic, social, aesthetic, and linguistic discourse. The fusion of the two viewpoints, from the south and upon the south, produces a disorienting polarization, revealing a thicket that is almost impossible to represent. The modernism of the container-gallery in Netivot also resonates in three grid-based works by Petel. One is made of beads woven like dreadlocks that stretch and fall from both sides of a boxed grid, within which the physical order of the weaving is revealed. This is also a portrait addressing the tension summoned by the south—in this case, the Caribbean/African represented by the dreadlocks set against the interior or the sealed face, netted in a technical order. The second work,""הלה) Hala), is a folk ornament that commemorates the original name of Petel’s grandmother, before it was changed to “Ella.” The devotional charge embedded in “Hala” echoes the religious-mythical gravity of the third work—a theatrical weaving that creates the word “Azazel” (hell) inside a box, lit up like a sign reading “On Air.”