John Currin. He is an amazing artist, full of humor. He uses pleasant colors and paints such bourgeois portraits, but in his works, there’s always some sort of disruption that creates unease - the neck is twisted and the fingers are crooked. His works always deal with sex and death or distortion, creating a stream of discomfort within a pastoral image. Because I work a lot around still life, there are all sorts of details in his paintings that stimulate me.
In my work, I use beauty to explore what exists beneath everyday comfort. There's a quote by Rilke stating that “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” To me, a flower’s most beautiful moment is the one before it begins to wither. There is something about getting to the meeting points between aesthetics, beauty, and discomfort, between moral questions and fears, that intrigues me. In the meat series, when the viewer faces the works, the initial experience is very pleasant, because at first one recognizes the objects. But then, something changes; viewers realize that the flower or lettuce are made of meat, creating a distinctive sense of discomfort and throwing the viewers into a completely different realm.
My father was a chef, so food was always central at home. As a child, I was his assistant in the kitchen. He would bring home lobsters, octopuses, and whatnot, and I would play with them - cutting to see what was inside. From a very young age, I understood that food is raw material, but it is also aesthetic and a type of practice, and that the range of actions possible when using food is amazing, if you dive into it. You have to be terribly precise, gentle, patient, and at times, simultaneously violent and cruel. Through the kitchen, I learned abstract values such as cruelty and compassion in a very practical manner.
I developed my artistic career while starting a family, which, I believe, made both processes quite interesting. Women experience everything through the body. When you are pregnant, you have four legs and four arms. My interest in the monstrous and grotesque, the inside and outside, as well as my preoccupation with life and death, were affected by my experience of motherhood.
Roni Landa, 35, multidisciplinary artist. Lives and works in Tel Aviv.
