Idan Bitton Studio Visit.
Israeli artist and dear friend Idan Bitton is best known for an 84-minute performance video First Kiss, which portrays a continuous kiss between him and Marina Abramović alumnus Alfredo Ferrán Calle. The video has more than 1.5 million views on YouTube, and will probably gain many more as it is so appropo right now, in light of the sad incident in Orlando this past weekend.
Idan’s performances have mesmerized me with themes close to my heart...robotic characters, radios, animalistic humans... I invited him to perform at the Monster Salon at Howl Happening! last fall, the closing event for Scooter’s How To Create a Monsterpiece show, where he stood on top of a microwave that hummed a drone while Idan became a Gilbert and George-like presence, within a sound installation of a recorded text that parodied the discourses of marketing. We also performed our pieces at The Artist is Not Present! performance salon which Runn organized at the Chashama storefront.
Idan’s visual art is equally stunning, and I have often been intrigued by his paintings of arrows and geometric figures, as well as sculptures of pedestals, which I’ve seen in the context of Bushwick Open Studios as well as the Openings Collective Group Show at the Church of St. John the Apostle.
Idan will be onstage with me performing during a piece I’ll be presenting on Monday, July 20th, 2016 at Joel Handorff’s Fairyland happening at Penn and Fletcher. To review the mise en scène, I visited Idan’s studio and was delighted to see the development of some of his latest work.
He has been working on paintings inspired by coloring books—which are so in vogue now—each color being contained precisely within the outline of the forms. His studio has an amazing innate sense of symmetry, and is all painted yellow after his recent installation White Balance, which I write about soon.
Idan has been building his own stretchers and even built the blue bench which is part of one of the paintings he’s been working on.
An intriguing development is that when he was working on a series of gumball machine paintings, he accidentally smeared the paint. (I think of Bob Ross’ Beauty is Everywhere show which is now on Netflix and I remember how he says there are no accidents in painting...)
Idan went with what the paint was telling him and so, he started pouring the acrylic onto the canvas and letting it coalesce with adjacent colors on its own accord. The result is the abstraction you see next to one of the gumball paintings, which I find most gorgeous.
This has dictated the latest direction in Idan’s work, and on the second image here you can see the latest of his paintings as a work in process. The paint was still moving under its own weight on the canvas when I took this photo.
Idan took the photo of me in front of the work, and on that day, which was picture-perfect sunny, I wore my favorite shirt right now...a Highland Originals all-cotton 19th century shirt, a pair of Tommy Hilfiger khaki shorts in a beige on beige flower print, and Tom’s espadrilles which I inherited from Koos.
Photos: 1. Idan Bitton. 2-6. Jorge Clar.
