Between Myth and Rupture: Painting the Binding of Isaac Today

For the past year, I have been working on a series of paintings that revisit the story of the Binding of Isaac — not through the familiar framework of obedience, faith, or divine command, but through the language of place and crime. What happens when Mount Moriah is no longer a symbol of devotion, but a landscape saturated with ancient and recurring violence? What does it mean to identify not with the patriarch or the hero, but with the victim?

This shift in perspective has shaped the emotional spine of the entire project. As I painted, the war in Gaza erupted, and the mythic violence of the Akedah collided with the ongoing rupture of the present. The images began to absorb the atmosphere of the moment: its grief, its moral ambiguity, its unbearable repetition. The distance between biblical narrative and contemporary reality thinned until they spoke to one another in the same visual language.

Alongside the canonical text, I turned to the Book of Jubilees, a lesser-known source that offers a strikingly different version of the Akedah. In this telling, Abraham is not simply tested by God; he is provoked by Sar Mastema, a demonic figure who urges God to challenge Abraham after the expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael. This version introduces an entire constellation of characters — the mother, the witness, the outcast — whose presence haunts the traditional story but rarely receives attention. In my work, these figures surface through personal and biographical layers, appearing as both symbols and people I know, including Hagar, a recurring presence in my own life.

Sar Mastema himself reappears throughout the series, sometimes as a cartoonish demon, gesturing toward idolatrous sacrificial rituals and the absurdity embedded in systems of power. His presence disrupts any clean moral reading of the narrative and pushes the paintings toward a space where myth becomes satire, and satire becomes accusation.

Visually, the works combine intense color and tense movement with a sense of psychological charge. Some of the paintings are self-portraits in the role of the victim, a conscious act of inserting the body into a story that has long been abstracted. The color rhythms — especially prominent in one of the submissions but resonating through others — emerge from a synthesis of arabesque flow, futurist motion, and formalist color tensions shaped, paradoxically, by my own color blindness. This limitation became a method: a way of destabilizing the expected palette and pushing the emotional temperature of the work even higher.

Taken together, the collection dwells in the fragile boundary between the individual and the collective, between myth and bloody reality, between the story we inherit and the violence we continue to live through. The Akedah, in this context, is not an ancient tale; it is a lens. And through that lens, we are all forced to confront the question that sits at the center of sacrifice: Who is asked to suffer, and who decides why?