Kibbutz Night 2016 - 2024
A series of paintings depicting the commonplace outdoor lamp-posts found across different Kibbutzs around Israel. These stand as silent reminders to a life gone by, never to return. Under their glow an entirety passed: loves, tragedies, dreams, longings, chance encounters and hours of boredom. Platek, who himself grew up in a Kibbutz, attests to a complicated personal relationship with this once idealistic and experimental form of communal living. Thus he imbues this series with a set of intricate emotions, bringing hand in hand feelings of peacefulness, remembrance and nostalgia with those of isolation, bleakness and a critical hindsite.
Working from photographs, Platek employed large visible brushstrokes on a relatively small surface. In this manner, the work holds abstract, painterly values contained within representational imagery - offering the viewer a retrograde progression from the image depicted back towards the action of painting.
Emanating from the works, the light shines brightly, heightened by the mass of darkness surrounding it.
In the aftermath of the brutal terrorist attack on the 7th of October, 2023, led by Hamas, the series gained yet another, mournful, perspective. The works were then dedicated to the Kibbutz's of the Western Negev desert, which suffered greatly under the violent assault.
Image / Text