Lone Ranger | Chelouche Gallery
The name ‘Lone Ranger’ seems as if it was borrowed from a 50’s or 60’s Western in which a lone rider without a name is seen galloping on his horse in the American prairies. Is it the nameless man played by the legendary Clint Eastwood, the hero in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns? Or is he the knight who returns from the underworld to seek revenge in the film ‘A City Named Hell’ directed by Eastwood himself? Maybe it is Don Quixote, the hero of Cervantes, who fought windmills with Sancho Panza, or perhaps it is the fictitious inventor of stories, the delusional Baron Munchausen riding on the back of his faithful horse.
Perhaps the name was borrowed from the group of expressionist painters ‘The Blue Rider’, which succeeded ‘The Bridge’ group in 1911 (whose artists include Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc) and whose name was inspired by a children’s fairy tale about a knight who sets out to right the wrongs of the world?
The same Lone Ranger shines in my paintings on his horse. galloping quickly towards an unknown destination through different picturesque scenes, sometimes an active and visible participant in their occurrence, and sometimes unseen (the painting reflects his feverish imagination). In my paintings, the lone Ranger is both the storyteller and the protagonist, present and absent.
What are the stories he tells, and what is his identity? Riding his horse, he moves through the mental spaces of human culture – the history of art and shared human archetypes. Armed with a sword, perhaps it is a brush or a pencil as it is with Aaron and the purple pencil where he creates for himself hybrid spaces within which he races. They are dense and, sometimes, isolated, existential spaces. The spaces were selected from fragments of various visual vignettes, international and Israeli artistic mythologies such as Beuys’s hat, rabbit and coyote, Aviva Uri’s painted eye and line, Caravaggio’s amputations, Bruce Nauman’s hand, Van Gogh’s ear and more.
The Lone Ranger conceives images from his imagination and hallucinations, connects the images, between the parts of different realities originating from other times and sources, and creates a dynamic, physical, and mental world for himself. This is not an ideal or comforting world, far from it, it is as if it was taken from Goya’s nightmares of the horrors of war that appear in his black paintings, from those of Dante or the hell of Hieronymus Bosch, but at the same time it is a vital, diffuse and developing creative world, which crosses borders between the dead and the living, between Thanatos and Eros, between reality and imagination, between world and underworld, between the mental and the physical.
This Lone Ranger is me.
Assaf Rahat.