Mom doesn't Let the Donkey into the House

 

Rachel Sukman

 

 

Shimon Pinto examines the Israeli society with eyes wide open through his canvases. His paintings express the struggle between the material and the spiritual. In a series of works from the last two years, Pinto created abstract environments, quiet and soft, yet well defined, and within them he interweaves fine, colorful three dimensional images.

This combination of accurate, flat backgrounds and a narrative built from familiar, realistic images, affords the viewer a different angle and moves him to contemplate about the essence of the work in front of him. Another quality that is characteristic to his work is an invisible movement. It seems as though he freezes the moment of action, but it continues to unfold in the eyes of the viewer.

 

One of the founding works in this exhibition was painted at the end of 2010: Mum doesn't Let the Donkey into the House. This work symbolizes the thoughts of the artists about his life and work. The scene illustrated in this diptych is divided and united at the same time on two canvases.

In the painting on the right canvas there is a donkey tied to a rope and a small bookshelf above it. The rope stretches on to the second canvas, on the left, where a boy can be seen riding a bike, pulling the donkey into his room. The donkey is a metaphor to the traditional, spiritual, world, while the boy on his bike expresses the material world.

The bookshelf that appears above the donkey is full of meaning since it represents the artist's bookshelf, his cultural heritage. The rope connects both paintings, both worlds, the spiritual andd the material. The artist identifies with both the donkey and the boy, perhaps expressing this way a longing to be released from stereotypes, or maybe it is his only way to bring salvation to this work.

 

Shimon Pinto was born in Arad to French speaking Moroccan parents. From an early age he knew that his language was art. He stayed inside his home drawing and painting throughout his school years, instead of playing outdoors, and replicated renaissance masterpieces of Michelangelo and Leonardo de Vinci. It was clear to him that he as going to become an artist. He later studied in the art history department of Ben Gurion University in the Negev, and in the Visual Art Institute in Beer Sheva. Since 2004 he lives and works in Jerusalem