Images of the Soul, as Multifaceted as Life Itself
The artist and therapist Israel Davidesco is also a seeker. He says Berlin helped him to heal his wounds
Hufelandstrasse 24, Prenzlauer Berg, an 1870s Gründerzeit building. Israeli artist Israel Davidesco lives on the fourth floor. The Prenzlauer Berg area is regarded as one of Berlin’s trendy districts, home to young people, artists and students. Traces of Jewish culture are to be found in the recently refurbished synagogue on Rykestrasse and at the Jewish cemetery on Schönhauser Allee, where, among others, Max Liebermann and Giacomo Meyerbeer are buried.
Israel Davidesco offers me a cup of green tea; there are heaps of Israeli newspapers in his kitchen, a medial link with his homeland. The rooms: studio, storeroom for more than 300 paintings, a living-cum-bedroom that also serves as an office. From his studio window he has a view of the Gründerzeit houses opposite, carefully restored after German reunification. “Stone, too much stone,” Israel Davidesco comments. His deep love of nature, which he has had since childhood, does not really go well with a city apartment: “Nature, water, trees, plants – they are my source of inner strength,” he says.
Born in Haifa in 1947, Israel Davidesco was a latecomer to painting. In 1978, at the age of 31, he began studying art at the Avni Institute of the Tel Aviv Art Academy, under Mina Zieselmann. “A wonderful woman,” he says of his teacher, “who gave me the freedom and support to go my own artistic way.” This may sound like a remark in passing, but it is important, not just as a memory. It was Mina Zieselmann who taught him to sign his paintings not on the front, but on the back; the artist stepping back behind his painting – standing behind it, in both senses of the term. After two years studying under Herold Rubin, Davidesco’s travels then took him to the United States, Mexico, France and Italy.
For Davidesco nature is also embodied in Atlit, the small village near Haifa where he grew up and his father had a farm. His mother emigrated to Palestine from Poland in 1933. His grandfather had come from Romania and settled in Atlit in 1888. When he speaks of his childhood, Davidesco sounds contemplative, almost romantic: “All my senses were active; I see the landscape, the bluish Mount Carmel to the east, the blue sea to the west, I perceive the smell of the earth and the flowers. I hear the birds. This image determines my whole life.”
Israel Davidesco came to Berlin in 1988. “I really only wanted to present my paintings, stay a few months and then return to Israel,” he says of those first days. But something else mainly determined his Berlin sojourn and to this day reveals the man’s inner conflict – always in search of the past, the whereabouts of his family, in search of himself, a man who, as he puts it, “still has a matter to resolve”. His grandfather Yisrael and eight of his mother’s brothers and sisters and their families disappeared without trace in Poland during the Nazi era, annihilated: “We never found out what happened. If you have a grave, you can at least express your sadness…” He says no more than this.
What made the artist stay in Berlin longer than originally planned? “I find Berlin fascinating,” says Davidesco. “This once divided city surrounded by a wall reminds me of the inner turmoil and isolation of my own country.” At the same time, this feeling of being enclosed oppresses him. As art-advisor Rita Cleuvers remembers in conversation, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Davidesco retreated into his apartment for a while, distraught, incapable of imagining what this state of affairs meant for him as an Israeli artist and a Jew. Rita Cleuvers: “At that time, his paintings were characterized by chaos, concentration, shadowiness and anonymity. They gave expression to a great inner struggle with the city and with himself, its people and the desire to find identity here.”
He painted the first “Soul Landscapes” in Berlin in 1988. These are paintings in which he “captures his dreams and his engagement with emotions and memories, experiences, light and abundance, barrenness, restriction and conflict.” Rita Cleuvers says of his later artistic work, “He inventively draws us into the field of tension that exists between abstract and figurative painting. Israel Davidesco’s pictorial worlds are multifaceted, like real life.”
Over the past 20 years Davidesco’s paintings have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions not only in Germany, but also in Great Britain, Spain, the United States, Italy and – naturally – in Israel. And how does Davidesco see his own painting? “When I began to become increasingly interested in art, I was repeatedly being asked what art did for me. I found an answer for myself: ‘I practise perception through it!’ I still think the same today. Paintings allow me to silently observe reality and my dreams.”
Once or twice a month Israel Davidesco travels from Berlin to Munich. He works in both cities as a therapist – not only with others and for others, but also for himself, a process of self-discovery that in turn influences his art: “The identification between me, my paintings and my therapeutic work is the transformation. The colour fields I create are my message of love, which I want to communicate in this world.”
Berlin will not be the last stop on the journey of this sometimes restless artist, before a later return to Israel. “My soul tells me that I have come to terms with things here, I have worked through the fate of my family and that of the Jews.” The artist feels a great sense of gratitude to Berlin; he has found friends here, and the city and its inhabitants helped him to “heal my wounds”. He would like to say farewell with his paintings, perhaps with a large exhibition. One great objective stands above all else, as is evident in one of his paintings, Der grosse Stern: the dream “of the unification of all humankind, without nationality, without racism, without religiously-defined borders”.
He feels the time has come to leave Berlin – but where to go? And again he says: “My soul will show me the way.”
Christopher Nielsen
© Deutschland magazine 5/2007