Works(photo collage) 1990
Works
Yoram Vidal creates a staged photographic collage from photograph parts, which he took earlier in a direct photography. With the help of a pair of scissors, he detaches the image form its natural environment, by that he denies it and uses it to create a personal space disabled from time and location signs. It is a mental space, in which the clear identification signs have sensual erotic presence, dealing with anonymous body parts and usage of saturated colors, which serve the images projected from the works. Vidal's photography meets the definition of treated photography, manipulated, staged photography. This photographic perception abandons the direct experience, of a photographer who captures a unique piece of earth and treats photography like a world being built by the photographer for his own needs. As such, the photography seizes being a view to the world and becomes a projected sign system, in which the artist dictates arbitrary laws. In Vidal’s case, a contrasting tie is created around his practice, between body and erotica and the estrangement of this sensual world to the acceptable sign domain, which is anonymous and cold. The estrangement to the marker domain is created via usage of a black and white cut image in a colored photograph, a photo of a masculine figure carved in wood and stone instead of a real body, and detachment of body parts from their specific human identity. Vidal is freely using all sorts of representations, marking and describing enabled him by the photographic medium. The collages he stages, give the images their sensual-sexual projection, which was almost lost while drifted away from the original.
Text by By Koby Harel - Maariv newspaper, 21.12.90