Battlefields Forever | Haim Gal On
Curator: Dr. Ziva Jelin
In Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” the protagonist Yossarian, a US Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier, says about God:
“When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It’s obvious He never met a payroll.”
In Battlefields Forever, Haim Gal On describes the war’s absurdity and foolishness as an infinite and universal situation. His paintings constitute an accusatory, horrifying, insane, cynical, and ironic text about the human, and especially the male nature. “Where there are boys – someone’s going to pick up a fight,” he claims. “Violence is a way to communicate, to base your status, to become a ‘real man’. All the boys in Israel play battle games, where you place toy soldiers to fight each other. It’s part of our DNA.
In previous painting series, Gal On dealt with his image as a man, planting it in messages popping-up on internet pages (Be’eri Gallery, 2008), as the mythological Narcissus who shoots his own reflection and sucks his thumb, shoots and sucks (Tel Aviv Artists House, 2019) and as a hunter and arch-masculin Minotaur (Kibbutz Givat Haim Ihud Art Gallery, 2021). These days, he focuses on images of men, hunters, and warriors of all ages, places, and periods in time. For the past five years, he has been exploring portraits of soldiers who died in war. Each of them takes him on an investigative journey. Who is the person in the photograph? Where did he come from? What does his uniform represent? What war was he killed in? It began in an organized manner, but became increasingly wild over time. He gathered stacks of characters from various sources, each with its own story and history, and then painted them, falling in love with them.
After October 7, he could no longer continue as the war was now so close, no longer an abstract idea, so he began painting refugees, writers, and thinkers.
The battlefield paintings integrate scenes from various wars, starting with the first war that was ever photographed: the American Civil War, as well as images from artworks that dealt with the terrors and horrors of war (by Goya, Manet, Millet, Courbet, El Greco, and others), and depictions of war from the culture young children absorb like Pokémon Pocket Monsters that fight each other, or superheros like Batman.
What brings people to hate, violence, and wars?
“…he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more.“
With virtuoso precision, Gal On depicts characters that come alive before our eyes. He employs various photographic sources in black and white, taking materials from archives and old documentaries, then “painting” them with colors, giving them new life.
In the introduction to the Hamidrasha Magazine’s sixth issue, dedicated to War, Gilad Melzer wrote:
“Visually, in the twentieth century, war no longer happens ‘there’. It’s here, in our living rooms, every day.” (2003)
Can we ignore it and repress its existence, while being flooded by visual information? Gal On deals with this question by choosing to distance local testimonies and paint different soldiers from various places in the world, other people and nations, to move away from the Israeli here and now, and deal with wars that are far away and with anonymous soldiers. Perhaps this is the only way to approach this painful subject – to observe it cynically and ironically.
We see American, Russian, English, Italian, Spanish, Viatnamese, Korean, French, German, Morroccan, African, and Australian soldiers, building remains in Hiroshima, partial battlefields, burned forests, Jews in the Holocaust, Korean, English, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, and Russian refugees, German machine guns and fighter jets, Israeli UAV’s, and a German Zeppelin. The subtle irony and cynicism rooted beneath the surface in Gal On’s works pops-up in the gap between here and there, in the collage-like mashup that welds together soldiers and refugees from different wars, an unfathomable accumulation of eras, events, places, and backgrounds, flesh and blood heros next to mythical superheros, and quotes from classic pieces by the greatest artists, which seamlessly integrate into the pictorial celebration. An all-round assemblage of everything. The war and the killing and the refugees, wounded and bleeding from all times, aircraft wings and bird wings, women gathering crops in fields alongside the remains of military buildings, monsters and people. The celebration of death, depicted in an accurate and awe-inspiring painting, the war’s photogenic beauty creates an ironic, unfathomable gap, making it hard to understand how to relate to it — an absurdity.
The name of the exhibition — Battlefields Forever — corresponds with the Beatles’ sweet song that everybody knows: “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and once again, the discrepancy between the warm and nostalgic origin and the new meaning creates a bitter, biting irony. The pictures’ canvases are not stretched on frames, but rather, they hang directly on the walls using metal grommets that are fastened to their edges, much like a military tarp. The soldiers’ portraits are crammed together, as a unanimous lump, on one wall. The overcrowding and abundance in Gal On’s work aim to convey a message that is not always comfortable to watch, but is effective,, because the terribleness of war and death is not convenient.
.
“What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.
