In commemoration of 70 years to Picasso’s most famous work “Guernica”, the artist Igal Vardi has presented an exhibition based on a new artistic theory he developed in the wake of his research on Picasso’s painting. This theory was expounded in his book: “Viva Picasso – Aesthetic Interpretation to his Work”, published by Yediot Sefarim, 2009. Vardi’s Guernicadoes not intend to present the tragic injustice of the township bombed by the forces of darkness, as the artist Pablo Picasso did in the original Guernica, but rather to highlight the state of humanity during the course of history, as a pendulum swinging between periods of war and peace.
Picasso’s Guernica was created in 1937 during the Second World War (WRONG!: during the Spanish Civil War), in the wake of the bombing of the township of Guernica in Spain by Franco, by means of airplanes and Nazi bombs. Picasso succeeded by means of his monumental Guernica work, to turn the individual and concrete township of Guernica into a myth. Therefore, the painting Guernica has become a myth of a scream against war, destruction and death. The work’s size is 7.760 meters long and 3.490 meters high. Picasso painted Guernica in the course of one month.
The artist Igal Vardi has executed Guernica ll at a size similar to Picasso’s original Guernica. The painting’s vast canvas was stretched in the Okashi Museum in Acre in the context of the Teatroneto (Bimot 2000) on 4.4.2007, where both visitors and spectators could enter the museum and watch the painting being executed. Vardi’s Guernica is called: Guernica ll – War and Peace.
Picasso’s Guernica is constructed as a composition of a triangle whose apex reaches above into the horse’s face. In contrast, Vardi built his Guernica as a triangle too, but the apexis facing downwards and reaches burning fire analogous to the never-ending burning bush which represents God. Vardi’s Guernica is divided into two. The right side depicts war with its destruction, death and annihilation, while the left side depicts fraternity, love and peace. Yet, in contrast to Picasso’s work which expresses terrible destruction that war generates, Vardi attempts to present the light versus the darkness, namely peace and fraternity between peoplesopposite the existence of war as an inevitable necessity. The burning bush is set between war and peace as God combining, in a complementary and supplementary manner, the two opposites: war and peace. Like Picasso, Vardi also utilizes the images of a horse and ox where the horse is galloping upwards while the wounded ox butts downwards. The work contains sunlight as well as the darkness with the moon. As in Picasso’s original creation Vardi’s work is painted in acrylic, in black and white.
Vardi’s creation Guernica ll War and Peace was displayed at the art exhibition at the Cervantes Institute in Tel Aviv on 14.6.2007. Accompanying the Guernica ll exhibition, Vardi put on display about 30 works on Picasso, where he depicted variations of Picasso in the painting process in his studio, facing the model and in parallel, he also painted a series of portraits of Picasso's seven women partners. Vardi’s artistic style is called: topological art and it is the continuation of Picasso’s style from his surrealistic period, when he depicted the images in deformations in circular lines as a continuation of his analytical and synthetic cubism. Vardi proposes a new style called: surrealistic cubism as a development and continuation of Picasso’s work.