Rami Meiri - Press

Walls of life / Rami Meiri designated “Distinquished Citizen” of Tel-Aviv in recognition of his remarkable contributions to the “City Landscape”

”Ha’ ir” [The City], 5 October 2000 / Edna Shabtai

Translated from hebrew

Edna Shabtai writes on the Israeli urban artist who “paints in square meters”—on Rami Meiri, who has been designated “Distinguished Citizen” of Tel Aviv in recognition of his remarkable contributions to the “City Landscape”; as exemplified by his wall paintings of the “Lady in Jeans” on Jabotinsky Street, “Man Shouting” in front of the Azrielli Building, and “People Exercising” on Gordon Beach.

It was in 1982 that, for the first time, I met his murals. I was then in my first year of being a woman alone. On one Saturday I walked up from Gordon Beach to the tumult of the street. The sea, with its beaches and with its incomplete promenade, was then the only place where I felt really like myself in my own private place in the city, which had been so much beloved to me and so suddenly had become foreign to me on the death of the man whom I loved, who so expressed his love of our city in his writings.
Gordon Beach was my delight on Saturday mornings. There in the vicinity of the wall of rocks, near the water line, I used to lay down flat my small mat and do exercises in yoga. There I pondered the gulls on the sailboats bobbing in the open sea off the beach. In this way, I was consoled and gained the repose to pass the week. There on the wall in Gordon Beach, I saw for the first time the painted images of persons doing gymnastics and playing, in natural colors, much like those on the beach from where I came. Instead of the ugly graffiti that was usually scribbled on these walls, these images signaled to me: "The beach, the sea and all that are in them can also live on an ugly concrete wall, and they can also follow you in your exit to the bare streets".
I returned to that memory eighteen years later, at the end of the summer of the year 2000, as I descended to the Gordon Pool to see the dancing colors where fish enjoy their lives in the water, children are playing, and images of persons bathing in swim suits, all come to life in the wall murals of Rami Meiri.
"There are a thousand square meters of painting there", Rami Meiri said to me on Thursday morning in his studio, from where he was to be uprooted in a short time after working there for twenty years. Exactly in this neighborhood appears, high on the pillar supporting the great building in the tunnel of Yarkon street, the last painting that he did, not long ago, for the municipality of Tel Aviv: a very expressive face with an expression that recalls, in its grotesqueness, the image of the small devils on the rims of Gothic cathedrals of the late Middle Ages. Rami tells the story, with a sheepish smile, that the municipality was concerned about the constant soiling of this pillar and approached him to paint on the pillar, because “no one would soil your work“.
In the beginning of the eighties, while he was a student in Avni Institute of Art, Rami did the Gordon Beach painting, and this painting was his first public mural. Since then, Rami Meiri has succeeded in bringing to the citizens his art of mural painting in tens of murals on the walls of Tel Aviv, from the young girl standing at an open window with green shutters and wearing jeans trousers hanging down almost three meters long, on a painted blue linen cloth that was pasted to the wall of the building ( at the corner of Jabotinsky and Ibn Gvirol streets ) – which I saw one morning from the window of bus no.61 on my way to my work sometime in the late eighties, to the giraffe, rising to a height of five stories on a wall in Florentine Street in a lonely public garden in this quarter lacking green.
"I put inside my murals my strong impressions" says Meiri. Such was the case with the mural that brought him to his breakthrough and to great recognition in Tel Aviv, and not only in Tel- Aviv-- the anguished face of the man, in great rage, tearing his mouth wide apart with his fingers. This striking image catches the eyes of tens of thousands of people passing by it day by day, on the wall of the " Max Fine" School, opposite the Azrieli Towers. It was the fruit of Rami’s half - year in Brazil.
From Tel Aviv, Rami’s reputation and his works spread all across the country -- to Jerusalem, Beer Sheba, Rehovot, Ramat Hasharon, schools, institutes of culture and sport, and municipal centers. He has imbued these works with great imagination and, at the same time, he has kept his basic principle-- the painting must connect to the reality, rise above it, and return to reality. In Ramat Gan, his figures climb on scaffolds in the front of a house on Jerusalem Avenue; and, on the wall of the National Social Security Building, he has painted old people and children on a street crossing which merges into a real such street crossing on the same site.
In the same vein, Rami Meiri himself started in Tel Aviv, departs from Tel Aviv, and always comes back to it. Tel-Aviv is the city he loves. As he says about himself, Rami is an “Idealist of Tel Aviv”. For him it is not just a city: it lives and breathes; it has a wild vitality; it is dynamic and always changing – as it was seen (I hear in me a voice) by Jacob Shabtai, who chronicled this changing city in his story of his love of the city – "Memory of Things". Rami Meiri also has this philosophy of love. All of the defects of the city, he sees with eyes of love.