Yishai Jusidman

Lives and works in
(b. 1963 in Mexico City, Mexico; lives in Los Angeles, U.S.A.) In Yishai Jusidman’s series Astronomer, 1987–90, he copied onto spherical surfaces the naturalistic landscapes of masters of the genre: the nineteenth-century Mexican artist José María Velasco, the impressionist Claude Monet, and the eighteenth-century British pastoral painter John Constable. The spherical form of the paintings point to the original eye and to the gaze (that of the painter) on a now-unattainable land. The flat picture plane of the painting, stretched out on a convex surface, also alludes to the deformation implicit in seeing. In these works the experiential confrontation with a place is reorganized into a form of Western representation preoccupied with parsing, subdividing, and regulating both the experience and the site. These unnatural operations, taken together, are known as “landscape.”