Nude

Yoav Shmueli

2012, P8 Gallery · Published in Erev Rav

Ora Ruven will not demand from you more than she demands from herself. In any case, that’s not a small thing; above all, it means pure honesty. Here she becomes slightly entangled with the world: how can a person—and an artist—with a heart and mind that are frighteningly good and upright live within a shallow, conservative, and hypocritical human and cultural society? I don’t know about today, but I suspect that Ruven, who insists on going to bed early—try calling her after 8 p.m.—and rising accordingly, at least sleeps like a baby.

In my sins, it took me far too long to reach my current stance on Ruven’s nude self-portraits: before you stands a piece of Israeli mastery. At first, I recoiled, as if I had risked contracting leprosy; but the works gave me no rest. Deep down, I could not deny their qualities and virtues: truth, honesty, integrity, simplicity, and artistic clarity. And above all, there is understanding, absorption, and embrace of classic photographic tradition—nudity, a measure of defiance, a measure of intimacy, classical foundation and form. Ruven is a small, humble woman, but Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Avedon can rest quietly in their graves.

To look straight at the direct and piercing nude of Ruven was like, in complete surprise and without preparation, seeing my own mother naked. That clamping vise, let’s say, was not something I particularly longed for. It was one of those rare moments of truth where art and psychology marry—in sharp contrast to all the tiresome mumbo-jumbo flooding our daily discourse. Because nudity, and any encounter with it—in life or in the virtual—always shuffles the deck, overturns the order, creates a new alignment, no matter what acquaintance or relationship existed before. It is one of the iron cultural conditionings of our lives; and so it is, in the case of one who knows how to point, define, and strike. From the distance of time and process, once the storm had quieted, I could see the beauty in the works, the act of art itself. And here lies the reward for Ruven, who dared—with modesty and maturity: she moves us.

Cultural and artistic Israel is a hell, a desolation, a barren land for the photographer who wishes to continue from the height of American journalistic achievement—let alone one who deals with nudity. No tradition, no present, and not even flies. That is the bleak and precise context for Ruven’s accomplishment.

Ruven hit the wall: self-portrait, woman, nudity, flesh, aging and old age, a willing yet terrified soul, light and shadow, a sharp lens, black and white, white and black—and you’ve surely noticed—very little gray. All the parameters that supposedly foretell distress: for the artist crossing the forest’s edge into its depths, foretelling for herself a resounding financial crescendo; and for the viewer who seeks amusement and then to go home. A smoking gun and a splendid conflict—and for both, both difficulty and reward.