‘Art saved me’
Young French-Israeli artist, just out of the IDF, shows his work in Teaneck
It’s hard to figure out how to start telling Ubab’s story.
It’s not that he doesn’t offer chronological details. He does — maybe with fewer details than is conventional, but with far more color.
But how can you start without telling the story of his name?
Except you can’t really tell the story of his name, because he doesn’t tell it. All you know is that he is Ubab — it’s French slang for “follow your dreams,” he said — because he had one name before he made aliyah, another one after he got to Israel, and this one — Ubab, this one word, unlike the others, with conventional first and last names — is constant.
You can start by saying that he’s an artist — mostly a painter, a sculptor, and a photographer whose work incorporates creative photoshopping — a craftsman, and a highly successful entrepreneur. At the risk of sounding as if you’ve lost all objectivity — maybe you have! — you can say that his art is colorful, often dreamy, and often jubilantly joyous.
You could start by saying that he was a lone soldier in the IDF, and as a reservist he fought on the northern front and in Gaza. He still could be called back to active service.
All that is true.
But maybe it’s good to start by describing his clothes.
Ubab’s shirt is unexceptional, and his kippah is knit; it’s big, blue and white, with a few big menorahs. It’s not subtle. And his jeans are splatted with bright paint. The splotches are irregular, and there are very many of them. The pants look artfully designed and composed, but they’re not. They look like they’d be expensive, but they’re not for sale, They’re the pants of an active painter, who loves color and motion and makes art out of whatever’s around him.
So — let’s go back to his story.
Ubab was born in Paris in 1997. “I grew up in a very special family,” he said. “We lived in the same place with 40 people.” It wasn’t exactly a commune, he said, but it was a tangle of interrelated Sephardi Jews — his mother was from Morocco, and his father was from Tunisia — that resulted in a web of complicated relationships and provided Ubab, as an artist, with a rich background of emotions to draw from as he began to draw.
“I went to a simple school in Paris, not a Jewish school, and I started to work when I was 13,” Ubab said. “I worked as a plumber. And I also worked in a theater, to organize the music and the lights and the publicity.
“I discovered a lot of strange people there, and they discovered that I could make art, and they pushed me to make art.
“At the beginning, art wasn’t interesting to me,” he said. “It just wasn’t my world — I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know anything about art history. But I was always sketching, and the people around me saw what I was doing, and they pushed me to do more.
“I also was writing a lot, and I was drawing. I was drawing my dreams. I was drawing different worlds. I needed a way to escape.”
Although he had been surrounded by Jews, he didn’t know much about Judaism. “I only discovered it about 10 years ago, when my father passed,” he said. But his father’s death led him deep into Jewish life.
“I had to say kaddish for him,” Ubab said. “I didn’t really know his family, but they came to me for kaddish, and I learned that he came from a very religious family. They said, ‘come with us,’ and I did.
“I discovered how to be Jewish; I learned about tefillot, and about Israel. All this discovery made me a better boy.”
This was in 2014. “I was 17, and I opened my company,” he said. “It was a design and marketing company, called UbabMad. I had a good team, seven guys; they all were older than me, they started to work for me as freelancers, and then they became my employees, and things started falling into place.
“We worked for television, we worked with singers, we opened clothing shops in Paris. It was an amazing adventure.
“I was very young, and when you look like a child, people take care of you,” he continued. “We had a fashion show, we had a concert, with 3,000 people. We had a video game. It was very cool.”
His life was good.
“And then I just had to go to Israel,” Ubab said. “I don’t know why. I had just needed to go there. It was 2019. I planned to go for a year, to be in the army, and then to go back to France.
“But then, after a few months, I signed on for three years in the army. I closed everything in France. I needed to be in Israel.”
But he also had to support himself. So while he was in the IDF, serving in the Nahal Brigade, Ubab “didn’t say that I was a soldier to anyone” — when he wasn’t actively on duty, of course — “but I said to myself, ‘I am a French designer who has come to Israel.’
“So I went to work with Israeli television, and Luna Park, the Disneyland of Israel, and I designed for singers, and slowly, slowly, I got work.”
That work was “not in art, only in design,” Ubab said. “I develop my brand of baseball hats. Now I have a team of four guys who work for me, and I have signed with a partner to continue to develop projects in interior design, branding, and marketing.” The company, like the one in France, is called UbabMad; it’s online at ubabmad.com.
How did he do that? His work “is my passion. If it is your passion, you can do it.”
Ubab is a man of many passions. He fell deeply in love with Israel. “It has been an amazing journey. I learned Hebrew. It was a good challenge. It’s all very cool.”
He also talked about how he learned about the Holocaust, and the traumas that European Jews suffered, climaxing in the pure evil of the mid-twentieth century.
But Ubab, you grew up in Paris? How could you not have heard about it? But he didn’t, he said; his family was Sephardi, his parents were born after the war, and the war and the Holocaust didn’t feature much in their lives. And they didn’t mix much with Ashkenazim.
He was both horrified and moved to learn more about the European history that had destroyed so many lives so close to where he had grown up. But he was in Israel now.
And then October 7 happened.
The nightmare of that day horrifically ended many lives; it also changed many other lives by uprooting assumptions and tearing away comfortable half-truths for more challenging, full ones.
“October 7 changed my life in art because art and parnassa” — making a living — “don’t go together in Israel,” Ubab said. “I had been making art, but only for myself. My company was doing well — we’re great at designing clothing, and we make embroidery for hats and shirts — but I wasn’t making art.
“When I was a lone soldier, I lived in Ra’anana; after the army, I moved into Herzliya with a friend. That’s where I was living on October 7.
“I didn’t believe it when they came to my door that day.” The news had just broken, but the full scope of the enormity was not yet clear, and Ubab hadn’t been paying attention when IDF representatives came to get him.
“I said, ‘I’m not a soldier anymore. I am not interested. I don’t love weapons. I don’t love fighting. I did my three years; now I need to continue with my life.’”
But when he realized that this was serious, “we left the house, and I went back to the army. We went to a base a two-, three-hour drive away. You don’t have the time to prepare yourself. You don’t know what you don’t know. Even after, you still don’t realize what happened.
“I was on the frontier with Lebanon, and also on the Syrian front. We were in Lebanon for eight months, and it was only the last months when people knew that we were going back inside Lebanon.”
His mobilization was supposed to be for only a week at first, and then he and his unit were told that it would be “another week, and then, we’re sorry but another week, and we said okay, no problem, and then it was another week and another one.
“I had to close the business. I was okay — I don’t have a wife or children, and with what we were dealing with, what is money? It’s nothing.
“And the war continued, and after a few months I realized that maybe I have to make my life again, and focus not just on my company but also on myself.
“What I really love is art. Art saved me. So I do the thing that I love more than anything — not business, not design, not marketing — but art.”
Last Chanukah, “I still was in Lebanon,” Ubab said. “It changed my life. When you are ready to die, the few seconds before you die, your body says that you are ready.” He thought he would die that night, the third night of Chanukah. He also realized that he hadn’t lit a Chanukah candle that night. “When I came back home, I had to light my own candle,” he said.
“This is when I realized that life is short – and it’s also long. I realized that I had to realize my dream — to paint. I have to make art, and I have to make my art public. Art saved me.”
When he finally got out of the IDF the last time — he might be called back again, he said, but he hopes, and in fact he senses, that the war is winding down — he went to Sri Lanka, and then came here, to the United States.
He’d met Jennie Mohl, the art consultant who shows and sells work by Israeli artists in her Teaneck space, the 198 The Plaza Art Gallery. Ms. Mohl was taken with his work; she hosted him last weekend, and his work now hangs in her gallery.
Ubab talked about his art.
Why does he use so much color? “Because it is my way to escape,” he said. “Every morning when I wake up, I decide to be white paper, and slowly, slowly the things that happened during the war come in, and also people give their sadness to me. So I have this white paper every morning, and how can I put good things on it? The color is my way of putting good things on my white paper.”
Most of his pieces includes escape routes, balloons, spaceships, and other ways up and away and out. They often also include the figures of two of his close friends who died in the war. “They are my heroes,” Ubab said. “They can be two little birds going up.
“We have to not forget our own star. Our own journey. Our own way.
“Everyone has his own way to pray for peace, for shalom,” he said. “We have to be together, our body and our soul. It doesn’t matter where you come from. It’s never too late to start.
“I know that I’m young, and I have my whole life to learn in. I know that everyone has to build his own legend.
Ubab is massively charismatic, his entrepreneurial impulses are strong, and they seem to work. He’s both a fine artist and a mass-market one; his business, at UBabmad.com, is flourishing, and he is making and selling art. He’s 27 years old; he can walk off into the future on many roads, or switch between them. It’ll be fascinating to see what he does next.
Meanwhile, his art is available at the 198 The Plaza Art Gallery, and it’s online at ubabart.com.
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