Yonatan Ron - Pita No. 4

In a small series of works on elongated wooden boards, Yonatan Ron presents oil paintings of pitas. Unlike the immediate associations evoked by its “lowbrow” image – an ordinary pastry, cheap and commonplace, emblematic of the Middle-Eastern lack of pretense or finesse, or of its authenticity, captured in the fork-free wiping movement that dips it in hummus — Ron’s baroque pitas, straddling the seam between nature morte and portrait, are depicted as larger than life. Painted one by one in close-up and dramatic foreshortening, they seem almost iconic, their tones and postures reminiscent of Christian masterpieces such as Mantegna’s “Lamentation of Christ” or Holbein’s “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb”.

Unlike the eucharist, the Sabbath challah bread or the matzah (unleavened flatbread), the pita connotes no festivity or religious rituality. Quite the opposite: as the bread of the poorest in society and the quintessential street food, it is associated with the quotidian and mundane, with “life (as such) in a pita”, as the popular saying goes. For the artist, the pita is also a personal memory of his grandfather who used to sell falafel in Jerusalem’s main market, a memory processed in the paintings into a monumental portrait, that lends a sublime dimension to every humble piece of bread.
Being a staple and a culinary marker of both the Israeli and Palestinian cuisines, the pita is charged nevertheless with politica and symbolic meaning: at times, the object of criticism against cultural dispossession and reappropriation and sometimes a dream about coexistence and peace.


It was used to punish Palestinian political prisoners, and recently became a touching symbol of protest in the struggle to free the Israeli hostages in Gaza.

In Ron’s paintings, the pitas are seen floating against a neutral background, seemingly relieved of the cultural and political burdens that bind them to the local context. These, however, reverberate in the defamiliarization and distortion created by the extreme horizontality and the scorched hues of the blackened dough terrain, which, overshadowed by the dark clouds of the past year, are tainted in gloomy elegy.