"It was never truly a wilderness" The Museum of Israeali Art Ramat Gan Meir Ahronson, catalog text, Spring 2013 Ilan Baruch's life journey began in Mea Shearim and from there to the wilderness of Judea and Samaria. It is a physical journey that Baruch undertakes with oil paints and canvas, but the journey is an outer one. His inner journey began with his exit from the alleyways of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods and entry into the Israeli culture, to the so-called free culture, to academia, to philosophy and archaeology, to discovery. Jerusalem, Ilan Baruch's birthplace, is embedded in his consciousness. In the paintings of Jerusalem, he positions himself like a distant bystander. Everything appears deserted, the walls and the stones come alive from within themselves. These paintings can look at first like paintings done for the benefit of pilgrims or tourists. After a more thorough look at them, the connection between the painted landscape and the painter of the landscape suddenly becomes clear, and it is more interesting to see Baruch's ability to specifically use large panoramic paintings of wider scenes in order to go through a process of focusing and concentrating on the smaller details. Apparently, through them, the landscape painting becomes a painting of the soul. Ilan Baruch lives in a new city that took over a fallow field in the area around Modi'in. This is a classic example of an Israeli landscape of green hills and fields that was turned into a landscape of concrete. Almost the fulfillment of the Israeli dream of conquering the wilderness, but sometimes one forgets that it was never truly a wilderness, and the landscape that is being increasingly overtaken by tall buildings in the Israeli style architecture, which can be ugly at times, strips the lands of its uniqueness. This view of the new city is not of interest to Ilan Baruch. He cares about the parts of the wilderness that still remain, and the people that are part of that landscape. The settlers, the Palestinians, the shepherds, the Arab farmers, all become one. Thus, Baruch goes out with canvas and paint, into the land that refuses to submit to construction, and he paints right there in the landscape. In principle, Baruch refuses to use tools that aid artists in painting landscape scenes. He does not use a camera. He returns instead to the exact spot where he began the painting and he paints the same view at different hours of daylight. Through this working method the concrete landscape processes into something else: a landscape that includes its transformation, on the one hand, and its uniqueness, on the other. The picture that he paints is not a copy of nature in the accepted sense of a copy nor is it a regular landscape painting. This is a painting that offers the viewer the artist's impressions combined with the changing reality for the purpose of the painting and the statement. Political views and love of the country are found in the paintings "Eve and The Family Outside." These two paintings are reminiscent of the "woman-landscape" paintings of Michael Gross and Ori Reisman. In their works, landscape resembles a woman, but in the work of Ilan Baruch the woman resembles the landscape, perhaps even symbolizes it. Ilan Baruch does not see a hidden figure in the subtle curves of the mountain as did Gross and Reisman; he sees a real woman, rooted to the ground, separate from the landscape, but fully integrated into it, bringing to the painting and to the place more that her image and her body. She brings her human presence to the landscape, without which the landscape, for Ilan Baruch, would be practically meaningless. In the painting Eve, the female figure holding a Bible in her hand, lies on the ground, nearly absorbed into it, her gaze turned toward the painter, as if saying to him and to everyone, "I have conquered. I have conquered this ground - it is mine." It is no coincidence that Ilan Baruch chose a figure that is reminiscent of a settler. She covers her hair in a scarf and her blouse is buttoned up to the top, although her legs are temptingly bare. In a clear way, she is a kind of "silver platter" that Nathan Alterman wrote about when he described the best of the Hebrew youth. As mentioned, the choice of Eve was not coincidental. The name, even if it is her real name, is the name of the First Mother, who tempted Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge, who was responsible for the banishment from Paradise; it is she who is symbolic of the woman who prods and seduces. Perhaps the words of Alterman in his poem "Sparks of Fire" from The Silver Platter describe what is likely to happen: Let us look at the fire and be silent Let every image be a footrest for her Young is her formidable beauty As the time when her light was born. Here is she a flying horseman, Here is she violinist and drummer, Here is she elusive cat, Here is she market day and wayfarer's inn. Here is she gold and thief, Here is she secluded monk, Here is she wagon on the road, Here is she war among brothers. And from the words of this poem the painting Eve starts on a new path, stops being a landscape painting and becomes, all at once, a political painting. Opposing it, in the painting. The Family Outside, a mother and her children, the artist's family. cluster together on the ground, integrating into it. The boy holds a spear in his hand which he directs toward the artist, the dog sticks its tongue out, the woman holds the Haaretz (lit. this land) newspaper in her hand, as if showing the newspaper headline to the artist and the viewer. Thus she connects the ancient landscape to reality and to a specific and defined political outlook. Baruch's choices are not accidental. He recruits the Arab shepherds in the area into his paintings. He says that they approach him as if he were a stranger invading their territory, and then they discover his creative act in a field meant to herd sheep. The women whom he places in his paintings as elements of landscape are not only female figures but carriers of meaning the artist must have in order to turn the painting of a landscape that depicts the outside into a landscape that describes a physical condition as well as a state of mind.