Mumbai native Binyamin Basteker's entire life is about extracting surprises from a blank canvas and following his soul instead of the trends
e’re all familiar with the echoes of the Holy City and each of us relates to those sounds in a different way: the murmurings of prayer at the Kosel, the honking cabs dodging pedestrians on Malchei Yisrael Street, the voices of Torah wafting from the windows of small and big yeshivos, the siren ushering in Shabbos. These are the melodies that play in our heart and soul, but can we really give them expression?
Jerusalem artist Binyamin Basteker can, and in his exhibition titled “Sounds of Jerusalem,” he proves himself a master of transforming rhythm to color, sounds to strokes. A painting of the Kosel is not really a painting of the Kosel. A landscape is really a dream. The ancient Splitting of the Sea transforms into a uniquely personal and present moment.
“I see spirituality in so many places that others might miss. Art is like pshat, remez, drash, and sod. Hashem gave each person a different way to see Him in the world,” says the chareidi artist with the long beard whose paintings are on display at Rosenbach Contemporary, Jerusalem’s leading private gallery devoted to exhibiting and promoting contemporary Israeli art. Binyamin might not look the way you’d expect a contemporary artist to, and neither does his curator, Uri Rosenbach — a chareidi gallery owner in a world most people associate with the secular culture of nonconformity and indulgent self-expression.
Back in the 1980s, Binyamin Basteker had begun to dazzle the Israeli art world. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Haifa Museum, the Bezalel Academy, and the Jerusalem Theater were just a few of the popular venues where one could find his works. But then he dropped off the radar, and no one in the art sector heard from him until he emerged nearly three decades later — a middle-aged man who looked like a yeshivah rabbi and talked about Hashem, and whose works had taken on an entirely different dimension.
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