Mosaic Muse

Rami Alon · Thoughts on the Creative Muse of His Mosaic

Rami Alon is a man full of positive energy. The perpetual smile on his face gives him away as an empathetic, affirming, creative person — one whom art captured when he became a pensioner, and which took hold of him in an unbelievable surge.

A former stonemason, he is entrusted with the secrets of making: a man who knows and honours the properties of stone.

“Mosaic has a history thousands of years old.” So writes Linda Kniffitz — curator of the International Centre for Mosaic Documentation in Ravenna — in the essay she devoted to the first Mosaic Biennale in Netanya, and she continues: “It began in Ur, the city of Abraham, and went on existing and developing as an art of all the great monotheistic religions. Today mosaic is experiencing a renaissance, rising anew onto the stage of history as a contemporary language, open to experiment and to hybridisation.”

And indeed the first mosaics appeared in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE, made of clay cones and river pebbles. In ancient Greece mosaics concentrated on scenes from mythology and on geometric forms. The Roman Empire perfected mosaic into magnificent floor paintings in monumental public buildings. In the Byzantine period, through the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, mosaic moved to walls and ceilings, all in order to glorify religion. Classical Islam, which like Judaism refrained from depicting the human figure, adopted mosaic for calligraphy and for complex geometric designs such as the arabesque. From the Renaissance to the modern era mosaic did not develop, and regained its force only in the twentieth century. Leading artists such as Gaudí, Klimt and Miró made admired mosaic works, treating the ancient medium as a material of personal expression.

Rami Alon creates, with a captivating naivety, empathetic works rich in colour — works that do the heart good in those who look at them. The series of plants and flowers, like the biblical and mythic scenes, receive from Rami Alon a personal translation of his own. It is hard to remain indifferent before works so rich in material: in ceramic, in glass, and in the setting of chosen stones.

Rami’s homage works to the classical, mythic artists make him singular in the local field, and earn him a particular respect among those artists who maintain an ongoing dialogue with the masters of the art world.

Rami Alon does not reproduce the works exactly. He always allows them — by virtue of his creative skills — to reach his own heart and the personal imagination of the viewer. He makes his mosaics with originality, with skill, and with an individual regard that commands respect.

In the introduction to “The Mosaic Code”, an exhibition I curated in Netanya with Esti Drori, we raised the question: what is the secret of the power and the enchantment of mosaic? What is the code that turns a laborious technique into contemporary art? We wrote then that a partial answer lies in the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer: “Both of them — people of art and people of science — live always at the edge of mystery, wholly surrounded by it; and that is the measure of their creation. At every time they have been engaged in harmonising the new and the familiar, in balancing novelty against synthesis, in imposing order, partial at least, upon the general chaos.” Just like Rami Alon, all mosaic artists make use of a code built from a system of meticulous rules and laws, which each of them set or chose for himself, translated into the new language they developed in order to present, to raise and to provoke the questions on the agenda of art.

Rami Alon makes homage to artists of renown throughout history, in Israel and abroad. First he is in dialogue with the known creators of mosaic in Jerusalem, his own city — Mordechai Gumpel, David Sharir and Perli Pelzig — who set the mosaics they made in Jerusalem stone, engaging among other things with biblical and local motifs.

In all the works he makes in dialogue with the masters of the art world he takes the painting and dismantles it — creating a renewed three-dimensional image and reassembling it in a personal colour, translated into the colours of this place. With Klimt, himself influenced by gilded Byzantine mosaic, he holds a dramatic conversation: to a work without perspectival depth he grants a personal translation founded on Klimt’s own decorative patterns. Alon uses angular cuts for ground and for garment; with his mason’s skill he employs a dense, deliberate setting of the stones, through which he gives new character to body and to face. When he shapes his dialogue with the Japanese artist Kusama, who makes an infinite repetition arising from a flowing psychic experience, he translates it into mosaic with a laborious energy of his own — measured, slow and enchanted.

The same holds for Rami Alon’s personal translation of “The Scream” by Edvard Munch: dismantling the painting and building it anew grants it a strong intensity, with theatrical meanings. Special mention is due to Rami’s dialogue with the painter van Gogh. In the meeting between them there are other, particular shades of touch, of materiality and of time. Van Gogh’s slightly sculptural placements of paint are translated by Rami Alon into joinings of stone, shards of glass and physical stone movements whose volume creates a three-dimensional depth. All these mosaics, which hold a dialogue with the heroes of the history of art, stir storms of feeling in the eyes of those who look, and disclose a new romantic interpretation through renewed contemplation of them.

Doron Polak · Curator, “Mosaic Muse”

Quotations translated from the Hebrew.