Blue Period
Blue Period
AS/COA's Gabriela Rangel notes how artist Yishai Jusidman "achieved a very difficult task to bring painterly conventions into an abstract reality that is self-referential as well as historical" in Prussian Blue on view at Americas Society.
Yishai Jusidman’s Holocaust-inspired paintings currently on view at the Americas Society (“Prussian Blue: Memory After Representation”) are reminiscent of those by the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans.
But Jusidman takes his further; he paints them primarily in Prussian blue, a cool hue that contains cyanide, much as did Zyklon B, the gas used to exterminate Jews in Nazi camps. “While researching the gas chambers when I was trying to come up with a way of approaching the subject through painting … I realized that Prussian blue was a vehicle that I could put to use in order to generate a direct relationship between the depiction and what it depicts,” explained Jusidman in an e-mail interview.
The artist first collected images and texts in a spiral-bound book before embarking on his painting. For Jusidman, a Los Angeles-based Mexican artist, the process of creating this pictorial meditation was “complex at times. You are dealing with images that provoke difficult emotions because of their associations, not because of what they literally depict....”
