Limbo: An abode of souls that are according to Roman Catholic theology barred from heaven because of not having received Christian baptism.

A place or state of restraint or confinement; a place or state of neglect or oblivion; an intermediate or transitional place or state; a state of uncertainty.

[Merriam Webster Dictionary]

Yair Perez dares to look at people. He met the figures appearing in his paintings long before they emerged at the encounter between the brush and the canvas, in other times and spaces, assuming a different guise each time. With his unquenchable curiosity, he repeatedly seeks the human connection—every encounter is an opportunity for a new painting, and every painting is a step towards the next one.

Perez’s paintings absorb therein the countless faces he has encountered in his life. The countenances and images stand for the daily human encounter, but they are not specific portraits and are not based on a familiar figure; they are the essence—a body that encapsulates the ongoing experience of interpersonal encounters. In his studio, he continues to seek and depict this confluence over and over. The multiple canvases spread on the studio walls are heavy with layers of paint. Each painting contains several paintings, one layer covering another, one figure superimposed on another. Perez moves the figures on the canvas as if they were puppets in a shadow theater, rather than inanimate matter. He creates and then covers and eliminates a figure or a gaze, which only yesterday was there, and is now gone.

Despite the evident lightness of his artistic practice, however, the resulting figures are broken and deconstructed. Perez’s figures collapsed on the canvas long before that last and brutal encounter we all recently experienced with the disintegration of the body, the family, and society as a whole. For Perez, the body is a vehicle for understanding the spirit within, and if the human spirit can be broken, so can the familiar physiological ergonomics, and it is equally possible to deconstruct hands and feet and reexamine the boundaries of the body and mind. The broken figures, which are not always easy to observe, populate the canvas. They have been there for years, stuck in a transient limbo. And so is he.

This eternal state of limbo in the afterlife—being in an intermediate state, in the moment of twilight, which is neither here nor there—was a source of great fear to Catholics, who were raised on the notion that even a soul lacking actual sin can find itself in the space between heaven and hell, since it still bears original sin. The attempt to grasp both ends of this unique condition has led generations of leading thinkers to address limbo, and attempt to deconstruct and locate it. From Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy to John Milton in Paradise Lost, various cultural giants passed through the gates of limbo. While Dante subjected the fathers of philosophy—who have not sinned personally, but did not turn to religion for salvation—to the circles of Inferno, Milton marched the patriarchs, the builders of the Tower of Babel, into this realm, and accused them of hubris and the human pretension to reach the heavens.

The encounter with Christianity and with the history of art which it brought into the world, accompany Perez in his work and are present in his paintings. Perez, who works as a teacher and bequeaths these very themes to the next generation, enthusiastically meets the fathers of painting with them, as if for the first time, and flirts with their motifs, which flow into his paintings. For Perez, Christianity is not a religion, it is art; and as such, it should be met with curiosity and dynamism. Patiently and attentively, he delves into the entanglement of the painting, consecrating the ability to search and experiment, until reaching a new understanding, the point of catharsis.

Under Perez’s gaze, we all transpire in limbo without having sinned. The inability to change the result through a corrective, healing act, as well as the very presence within the imposed destiny, leaves one infinitely helpless, yearning for redemption. With no way out of the helplessness, Perez groups his figures into a community. The disintegrated, solitary figures, the painted portraits of the lone artist in the studio, the person confined to a square—all come together in one format; like a mass pietà, where it is unclear who is holding whom, they collapse onto one another and blend with each other. In this space, the individual whom Perez was busy seeing and preserving over the years, now chooses to assimilate into the collective. The figures combine into masses of color, into a single silhouette, dooming the attempt to perform a bodily scan of a single figure for its beginning and end to failure. The feeble figures seem to have shed the bones that hold them together, and they fall apart, trickling and leaning on each other.

Through multiple paintings, Perez strives to understand how we arrived at this intermediate state. Did we choose or were we forced to choose what is happening outside? At a time when the winds of horror, which he dared to awaken in his paintings in the studio years ago, appear to have connected to the reality beyond the walls, it no longer matters whether or not the presence in limbo was made by choice. All that is left for Perez to offer the figures in the paintings, to himself, and to us is pure consolation. Bearing in mind the idea that every action activates a chain of reactions, which affect each other—he takes a freedom of movement for himself in the existing reality. Alongside the disintegration, amid the intense, gripping colors that do not let go, he channels his figures to human contact and closeness, always remembering to leave the sky above them blue.