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Aaron Keydar has been creating wood sculptures in the Spanish island of Formentera for more than forty years. Inside The Wood explores Aaron’s life-memories through the place where he lives and the surfaces and textures of the Mediterranean landscape. This will serve as an attempt to understand his artwork and the relationship between the person and the artist -if such a distinction can be done.
Therefore, how does the artist relate to the person, specifically through his life- memories, both in the implicit form of the displayed embodied memories, and explicitly, by recalling past experiences through the wordy narration of them? On the other hand, how do Aaron’s past life experiences may, partially at least, shape such a so expressive bodily activity as wood carving, specially through his embodied memory? In addition, how these two relationships -artist and person; memory and artwork- relate at the same time to place -through material elements of the landscape: wood trunks-, or vice versa, how place continues to influence and constitute in a never-still flow, both Aaron’s life-memories and present circumstances?
As Merleau-Ponty indicated in analysing Cezanne’s personality, life and painting: “Although it is certain that a person’s life does not explain his work, it is equally certain that the two are connected”. Inside The Wood is therefore presented as an audiovisual interpretation of the relationship between Aaron’s life-memories and his artwork in the purpose of trying to provide understanding of the conditions that might be hinted at Aaron’s self-narration of his life and his embodied memories, and thus at the exchange between past and present.
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