Born in New York, Y Keduri has been based in Jerusalem since 2005.

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One of the things I love most about painting is its celebration of surfaces: the cracks in a Renaissance plaster wall, cartoony black lines, rusted metal, distant mists. Painting embraces them all. Though I am drawn to the tangible 'concreteness' of objects, I find them most compelling when they verge on abstraction—when viewed from angles that render them almost anonymous. In these moments, we no longer see them as 'things,' but as pure surfaces: color, texture, and form.

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Unlike many other arts, representational painting is uniquely suited to explore the problem of depth and space within a static image. Since Classical painting, the ability to render rich, spatially evocative backgrounds has been a hallmark of the Masters. The Modernist movements—especially Analytical Cubism—introduced new ways to approach this challenge, expanding our visual grammar of space. In my own work, I engage with these same questions, often segmenting my images across multiple surfaces—whether wood panels (a technique I learned from the inimitable Richard Osterweil), small canvases, or ceramic tiles. By doing so, they disrupt the illusion of continuous space, inviting the viewer to reconsider the visual ‘reality’ they take for granted.

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I have been especially inspired by the Metaphysical School—De Chirico, certainly, but also Radziwill, Morandi, Cummins, and  Fonseca. Beyond them, there are others: Klimt, Sisley, Modigliani, Jakuchu, Twombly, Chardin—painters who have each contributed a grammar of surfaces and structures, allowing us to see the world’s ordinary strangeness anew. I am especially interested in the tension between our constructed world—its orderly planes, grids, and geometry—and the unruly, organic life that pops out from behind every corner.

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If that makes everything a kind of landscape, so be it :)