Formally Speaking

Eyal Yehuda

365 wooden logs of different heights, painted white or black, are arranged to mark the year 2010 and create a long line of slender columns. All the lumber was collected within a walking distance from Eyal Yehuda's residence in central Tel Aviv, and contain, among other things, building remains from the ongoing renovation of Habima Theater and other buildings nearby.

The line of logs, consisting of one log per day, contains traces of time, place and culture. When Yehuda brings that which he has gathered in the streets into the museum, he domesticates his daily wanderings in the city, giving them shape and discipline. Though the dirt peeps through the paint, the graph, generated from the arrangement of the logs, holds a promise of organization, order and logic.

The works created by Yehuda while wandering in the street, are connected to small and invisible actions, all of which harbor an underlying thinking about art: He moves, for example, the bricks of pavements, or slots a feather into cracks in the sidewalk. The work here is the continuation of this practice -establishing rules by which he is committed to perform a particular act each day, and to be alert to a particular issue during the year - and simultaneously to its opposite: he detaches the daily labor from the street and places it in the museum through a strict process of taming and cultivation. Like in all his works, the tension between order and chaos, chance and method, is preserved here too.

Born in Israel; lives and works in Tel Aviv