My name is Dan Reisner; I am an artist – sculptor and explorer.
Since childhood I remember myself fulfilling this equation. I remember myself discovering each morning, anew, the way from my parents' house to school, examining the trees by the road, finding rocks and collecting all sorts of objects and materials. After school hours and while playing, the nearby surrounding – the creek and the grove – had turned from a well-known location into an environment in which materials and ideas are being rediscovered, decomposing and recomposing all the time. The exposure to materials, to the possibilities of combining between them and building them as a new world, had been the basis to my future creation. The materials, their attributes, their history and their cultural association – all these are often the motive of my creation. In my work, it is important to me that the audience should experience a personal experience of discovery and excitement coming from an inner connection. I want them to experience a cultural emotional and sensual experience that would change their perspective on art and life.
In my years of study I had put myself, through my work, in the role of actor, creator, craftsman, inventor, one who can provide the ultimate work, a man of deeds, the action of the self – which expresses itself through a wide variety of materials and crafts. A good example is the statue "Fool of the Seas", which presents a figure with a wooden leg that is made according to 18th century medical books. A barrel, which I had built after a short training with a cooper, is connected to the leg. The figure has a plaster of Paris body, which resembles a Greek statue. Out of the statue comes a spinal cord, which reminds one of the neck of a musical instrument, on it there is a shell made of polyester connected to copper pipes. On the other edges of the pipes there are side view mirrors of a car. The mirrors remind one of the mythological figures – Medusa. The work has many historical and cultural references, among them stories of voyages across the ocean that are filled with terror and lack of knowledge. I was interested in the gap between order and terror, between the external and the internal, conscious and unconscious. In my work you'll always find a dialogue between past and present, between an inner experience and the surroundings in which it takes place.
In the first few years after my BA studies, I concentrated on the subjects of the human body. I was fascinated by the gap between concepts such as beauty, wholeness, aesthetics and natural performance abilities versus the fragility of the body and its weaknesses. I wanted to examine the body in its lacking – lacking in the meaning of being crippled as a result of amputation, bisection. This act of severance inhibits the body of its senses of ideal and wholeness, but at the same time the striving towards completing the object and towards perfection does not cease. I was drawn to work in carving tree logs. The wood is an organic material, it hubs its own growth, one layer envelopes the former, from its being a young plant all the way to its cutting as a thick tree and being turned into the material – wood. Through the work process, the wood always remembers its origin as a tree. Even today, years later, the wood in my works keeps changing.
It was essential for me to connect to the beauty ideal from its cultural sources through a traditional work of woodcarving and to confront it with the contemporary. The gap is between the culture and cultural ideas as opposed to the actual body, the flesh, the vulnerability and the void. I wanted the audience to be fascinated by the beauty and the achievements of the work and then have them experience the calamity and loss. As an Israeli, I experience it in a most harsh way.
As aforesaid, in my work there is an ever-present dialogue between past and present, between an inner experience and the surroundings where it takes place. In 1988 I was invited to display an exhibition in "Artist Studios" in Tel-Aviv. I chose to create works that would be produced in accordance with the location, and function in relation to the surroundings. I worked with cement. Cement suited me, for it is a present and concrete material, with brutal characteristics, factual and external. I created large works, cast into molds, works that form a very present environment; the sensual touch is crude, soft and industrial. The constructive works formed a dialogue with the architectural surrounding, with the massive concrete way of building that the Israeli eye had long been accustomed to and turned it into a local classic. But also in these works, I had combined other materials that shake one's conception: a thin, fragile tree log in a bound aspect between two concrete cubes; a huge Eucalyptus log, packed with years of memories, which I had found in Hadera and placed parallel to a smooth, soft form made of concrete. The use of concrete sewage connectors gives a hint of inner substances and their outlet. In these works I also examined man and his magnitude against something that is monumental. It was possible to walk into the concrete sewerage, to touch the different materials and to feel the power as opposed to the frailty of the artist and viewer.
Later, in the concrete works, I combined green vegetation growing out of molded concrete containers. The concrete works deal with stereotypes of urban space, in the containers which function as intermediation and acceptance.
Correspondingly, I created environmental sculptures in public areas: Ra'anana Park, schools and private institutes. In the non-gallery space the intermediation is canceled and the emphasis is put on the presence of the object. Also, a dynamic relation is formed between the viewer and the object and most of all; the statue becomes a part of the viewer's living space.
In the last two years I have been working on a sculptural installation, formed by a large number of self-portrait figures. The figures are processed in different ways and are bronze cast (see more in Gallery).