In his solo exhibition “Israel Hayom,” Tomer Dekel presents a series of paintings created on Haaretz and Israel Hayom newsprint. A word, an image, or an idea embedded in these dailies expands and takes over the entire spread, metamorphosing into a vivid painting that obscures and erases most of what was there before. Some of the paintings are installed on wooden shipping pallets, ordinarily used to transport goods, which, in Dekel’s hands, are transformed into wild creatures of sorts, part pagan statues, part supports for the works.

Dekel’s decision to paint exclusively on the pages of daily newspapers undermines the very notion of “tabula rasa” or “blank page.” The encounter with a pristine white canvas, factory-made and untouched, feels alien to him, like an impossible attempt to create something from nothing. Unlike the European tradition of stretching a clean canvas over a wooden frame, Dekel operates in a distinctly local context, devoid of painterly history, yet saturated with political history, collective memory, and pressing current events. The printed newspaper allows him to plunge directly into living material, transforming the news text into the painting’s surface and the painterly arena at the same time.

The sculptures, reminiscent of wild creatures and built to support the paintings, are likewise made of materials with a past: discarded wooden pallets found on the street, once used to carry heavy loads. Dekel takes them apart, using only the wood they yield. Guided by where each pallet was found, the form and condition of its wood, or simply by intuition, he pairs each pallet with a single painting. In the exhibition, they stand upright, disassembled yet self-supporting, poised to enter the everyday battle of the Israeli sphere. As in the painting Yamit 2000, which depicts a brawl where white plastic chairs are wielded as weapons, the material’s purpose changes according to the hands that hold it, and their choice to either deconstruct it or use it to tell another story.

Alongside the insistence on clinging to the everyday and all that it represents, the exhibition also proposes a more distant historical perspective: a view of local reality as a makeshift, ephemeral project, and of the paintings as though they had been made from a moment in the future, surviving as traces of a vanished past. From missile fragments repurposed as playground equipment, through local politicians and fighter jets, to COVID-19 testing sites that recall encounters with extraterrestrials—the Israel that emerges from these paintings is a bustling field of desires and possibilities, violent eruptions and survival attempts.

Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are unfolds in two parallel worlds: the realm of fantasy, manifested through its illustrations, and the realm of reality, structured through words and sentences governed by clear rules. The child’s movement between fantasy and reality gives rise to a potential space—to borrow a term from psychoanalysis—the place where the child’s psyche develops. In Israel Hayom, the wild images that almost entirely cover yesterday’s news function as a visual Midrash on reality, while the wild creatures, sculpted in wood, seem to spill out of the paper and physically overtake the gallery space. The constant oscillation between the harsh words of the news and the painted image and sculptural forms that seek to latch onto them, creates a twilight zone where the psyche can play and process the tensions at the heart of the local experience: between the sense of security offered by home and the insecurity of living in Israel; between boundless beauty and erupting ugliness; between the dreaming child and the aging adult.

Some of the paintings were created during Dekel’s 2021 residency at Artport and now return with him to the gallery. For the duration of the exhibition, Dekel will relocate his studio in the gallery, painting today’s Israel directly onto today’s news. There, in the gallery, the fragile newsprint will continue to bear the weight of the paint layers applied to it, transforming from a short-lived document into a work of art meant to endure, like a persistent material attempt to confer permanence and stability in a place where both feel more elusive than ever.