In this way, drawing inspiration from a wide range of philosophical, literary, and religious texts, Kami continues the art historical quest to locate the unknown within material form.
It was his large-scale portraits that first gained him acclaim from the international art world, leading to receptions of his artworks in various important museum exhibitions and biennials.
His experiences viewing ancient architectural structures and the vast, dry desert left a significant impression on him, which he later carried out into his artwork.
"[11] Repetition is also a core element of Kami's Endless Prayers series of works on paper—in which poetry and sacred texts are cut into rectangular fragments and pasted into mandala formations—as well as in his Dome paintings, consisting of concentric circles of tessellated marks.
[4] He made large-scale portraits that encourage the viewer to closely observe the human face Kami notes, "as the size of the paintings grew larger, the images became a little blurred, and gradually more and more out of focus.
Kami's portraits, based on his own photographs of family, friends, and strangers, present ordinary, introspective subjects, yet each face acts as a threshold between the sitter's impenetrable inner thoughts and the viewer's perception.
Z. Kami's big wall of portraits: blurred, warmly muted, photo-based images of 16 people exude a haunting, funereal mood.
"[15] Though Kami's portraits are known for their subtle, meditative qualities, the artist gained particular attention for his more political work, such as In Jerusalem (2004–05), which was included in "Think With the Senses, Feel With the Mind," curated by Robert Storr at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in Italy.
The work depicts five prominent religious leaders – a Catholic cardinal, an Eastern Orthodox bishop, Sephardic and Ashkenazi rabbis, and a Sunni imam – who came together in 2005 in fierce opposition to a gay pride march to be held in Jerusalem.
In Storr's essay "Every Time I Feel the Spirit...", he credits Kami "with gentle audacity for accepting the challenge of limning credible contemporary images of prayer—including several of clasped hands raised in adoration and/or entreaty—and, so, under current art world conditions, for the exceptional courage of his convictions.
He has also shifted from representing his subjects with soft, blurred gazes, to showing them with eyes closed, heightening their introspective, emotional distance.
As Steven Henry Madoff has written about these works, "We climb across the knowable into a state of expectation and suspension in which we open ourselves to the possibility of an immaterial presence, a link to mere Being.
"[17] In this way, the paintings' focal points are not the eyes, as is the case in traditional portraits, but rather the entire face, emanating as a single, enveloping presence.
"[18] After these portraits were shown at Gagosian in New York and London, Jackie Wullschlager in The Financial Times wrote that they "are full of the paradoxes which make him one of today's most intriguing conceptual painters.
"[20] Though he is most captivated by the human face and what it means to represent it, Kami has also explored mixed media work and abstraction, using these forms to further examine themes of light, infinity, and the act of looking.
[21] These works—made by gluing minute brick-shaped cutouts from Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew texts into circles—recall the ritual of prayer and the mosaics of sacred architecture, and the brick patterns of domes in particular.
Paul Richard of The Washington Post writes of this series: "Peering at that picture is like standing with your face upright underneath a punctured dome, say, the Pantheon's in Rome, or that of some Turkish mosque, looking through the oculus, which interrupts the masonry high above your head and lets you see, beyond, the brightness of the sky.
"[22] The Domes offer an abstract counterpoint to Kami's portraits, bringing ideas as diverse as architecture, light, prayer, meditation, and minimalism into a single act of repetition.
At the same time, he visually obscures and anonymizes his subjects, preferring to approach broader questions of the infinite and the ineffable rather than delving into the specifics of a religious existence.
Kami, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (2003); 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007); Perspectives: Y.Z.