Yishai Jusidman
Here are two ways of thinking about self-portraits. The first suggests that a self-portrait is a way of revealing things about ourselves. The second proposes that everything about us—from our handwriting to our favorite toothpaste brand—constitutes a self-portrait. For the L.A.-based Mexican artist Yishai Jusidman, the ideal self-portrait contains both and neither. Instead, he views the age-old practice of artists painting their own likenesses as a hyper-conscious philosophical exercise.
A painter who has long been known for his marriage of pre-modern techniques, such as egg tempera and anamorphosis, with postmodern cultural developments, such as Conceptualism and Minimalism, Jusidman has long made a habit of drawing important connections between old ideas and new orthodoxies. Nowhere is this truer than in the recent series of self-portraits he finished during quarantine. A mixture of highly detailed realistic canvases and schematized blocks of color, these paintings propose a classic painterly ideal for Jusidman’s 21st century self-portraits: a study of seeing oneself seeing.
— CVF, USFCAM
“What to do meanwhile? One could start by recognizing as chimeras the visions of the Good projected onto contemporary art by many of our art-prophets—hustlers, fraudsters, opportunists, posers, mythomaniacs, quacks, smooth-talkers, braggarts, self-flagellators, whiners—buffoons that ridicule the system at its rulers’ pleasure and expense. Eventually, perhaps, one could instead take to art as one takes to friends, seeking out artworks that bring about the aesthetic correlatives of forthrightness, integrity, good faith, reciprocity, effort, insight, understanding, refinement, generosity, challenge, vulnerability, ingenuity, curiosity, cheer, and humor. In short, one might want to consider the Epicurean and Stoic quest for a well-tempered good, one that leaves commensurate room for beauty and truth to find their way into art.”
— From Yishai Jusidman Avant-Garde Kitsch, 2019 (unpublished)
Courtesy of the artist.
About Yishai Jusidman
(Mexico City, Mexico, 1963)
He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Yishai Jusidman’s work deploys traditional painterly concerns in contemporary frameworks. His paintings have been featured in important international exhibitions, such as the 2018 Shanghai Biennial, 2014 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, the 2001 Venice Biennale and Ultrabaroque—Aspects of Post-Latin American Art (Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California). His work is often included in panoramic exhibitions of Mexican contemporary art, such as The Era of Discrepancy (MUAC, Mexico City, Mexico), Echo—Contemporary Art from Mexico (Reina Sofía, Madrid) and Soleils du Mexique (Petit Palais, Paris). The traveling exhibition of his series Prussian Blue (2010-16), initially seen at MUAC Mexico City, will be hosted this winter/spring by the Ein Harod Museum of Art, Israel. His work is published in Landscape Painting Now (DAP, 2019), Vitamin P, New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press, 2003) and 100 Latin American Artists (Exit Press, 2007), and has been reviewed in the world’s most influential publications on contemporary art.
Artist website: yishaijusidman.com
Gallery website: galeriaomr.com