Moshe Shek, known by his friends as Juki, is a unique, long-standing artist who attempts, in his own picturesque and colorful language, to tell the story of the sources of influence, events, times and places that have shaped his life and his artistic outlook. Like other non-native Israeli artists, Moshe Shek knew a different landscape in his childhood.
The command, “Go forth from your native land and from your father’s house,” has been a source of personal, physical and spiritual growth for these artists. It reverberates in their art, which repeatedly attempts to interpret the concept of a homeland.
Moshe Shek’s art attempts to identify symbols and myths as conduits that convey a sense of belonging and connection, as a basis for identification and as a counterweight to the feeling of uprooting. It seeks elements that create a continuum of a local material existence, which at the depth of its foundation has become universal.
Moshe Shek’s art is based on three elements: the locality, the material and the continuity.
The locality:
Creating from local materials, a longing for regional characteristics, respect and love for generations of artists who have known the secrets of the environment and whose art is unassumingly passed down from generation to generation.
The material:
That which can know how to fool the reckless person and to accede to those who are attentive. That which must be examined, comprehended and made love to. The material that the Great Masters know is indistinguishable from the message and which together make up the core of the art.
The continuity:
The yearning for the secrets of the past, for age-old solutions, for the exact statements of the craftsmen who lived in this land and for the people who drifted to its shores and who are trying to take root.
Moshe Shek’s work can be divided into several central series, including totems, animals, pottery and painted plates. One can recognize in each of these series considerable attempts to repeatedly explore, through various disciplines, formative experiences of interior and exterior, volume and material, rhythmic sound and color. Observing and listening are interwoven in these collections as the leitmotif and together they weave the characteristic texture of the artist. Each of the series revives a dialogue with the present and with local material and the cultural rule.
Some consider Moshe Shek a Canaanian artist, but his Canaanism is of a unique breed. It heralds connection and intimacy, it points to the similar and it does not lock itself within diversity. Shek opines that the cultures that were formed in this region have maintained a bond of continuity and attachment. In the Ashdod figurine, for example, which was discovered in archaeological excavations in Ashdod and dates back to the 12th century BC, one can see traces of Aegean origins and Eastern elements.
According to Shek: “The uniqueness of this region is its synthesis of varied cultures. The different cultures met at a crossroad and something new emerged from this. This is where the phonetic alphabet was created, here the Bible was written, this is where Judaism, Christianity and Islam originated”.
Moshe Shek’s totems are secular and humanistic and they convey information from the past to present day and to the future. Shek believes in the constant human need to elucidate and to seek, to receive information and to impart information. He does not believe in an external source of authority. In his view, the source of authority is within the person, and the person is responsible for [finding] meaning, for interpreting and for querying. Longing is man’s true homeland.
Shek is a humanist in the deepest sense of the word, a humanist who believes that it is possible to repair and improve our world, and that art plays a part in this remedy.