In the premium broadcast on Sunday on i24news, the painter Yehiel Attias shared the emotion aroused by his artistic project hailed on social networks: a fresco representing an olive tree, symbol of peace and hope, in homage to Ilan Halimi, accompanied by a verse from the book of Job – “because for the tree, it is still hope”.
“It was only a digital model,” he said, stressing that he was not waiting for such success. His intention was not only aesthetic: “This tree, it challenges. Even cut off, he will repel. A strong symbolism that the artist wanted to transmit in the face of a particularly violent gesture of desecration.
Yehiel Attias is not at his first artistic commitment against anti -Semitism. He recalls having already used his art to counter hateful tags and to react to provocations on the wall of the righteous. “When it happens, I need to put my art at the service of something bigger,” he says. For the moment, the work exists only in digital form. The artist appeals to the municipalities in order to be able to make it “in real life, on a wall of the 12th arrondissement of Paris”. A work with a memorial aim, “worthy of a monument where everyone could meditate,” he explains.
