Mist: Ritual in still life

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What do I look for in a still life? For it to stop being a still life.

A vase, a cup, or a plate arranged casually in our studio or home, informed by their functional connotations, available and accessible. Usually, their size, silhouette, and shape are also unremarkable. This is one of the reasons they have been painted for centuries. Through them, one can understand and practice painting volume, composition, three dimensionality, and perspective.

This is how it starts, but sometimes, the act of painting objects soars, expands, and becomes an entire atmosphere, an act of devotion that involves deep concentration and attention to every hue and brushstroke, to the order or the chaos of things. And within the act itself there is also a statement about artmaking, about the nature and origin of the objects, and about the intrinsic absurdity of the encounter between these abstract qualities, the material of the painting, and the materials from which the actual objects are made.

Sometimes, while exploring and expressing what is known as “still life,” direct observation is discarded and the work becomes conceptual. Either way, the idea of “still life”, which is inherent to the history of painting and refers to still objects, holds the possibility of obfuscating and playing with meanings, shifting between areas of formal and cold, even educational, mimetic depiction to internal and profound exploration of what outwardly seems simple, yet allows the expression of complex questions.

For this exhibition, I invited artists whose still life paintings have something that particularly interests me as a painter. The selected works that touch on themes like culture, emotion, and, above all, deep questions about painting.

Some of the paintings in the exhibition explore two key concepts in the history of Western painting, which underscore the transience of life: memento mori (“remember that you must die”) and vanitas (Latin for vanity), in the sense of futility. These concepts are intrinsic to the genre of still life paintings, which addresses the ephemerality of corporal human existence, often expressed in paintings of skulls, vegetables, fruits, and flowers, sometimes in the process of decay. In the works featured in the exhibition, these notions of demise and impermanence receive contemporary formal and material interpretations.

In other paintings, depictions of still life allow contemplation of philosophical issues, such as the gap between the everyday and the sublime, and examination of notions of beauty and fascination through representations of quotidian objects that have taken a new form or were extracted from their natural surroundings. The works in the exhibition also offer expressions of vague recollections of objects from the past, which have lived several incarnations; and the examination of the absurdity held in the encounter between idea or inspiration and material. In some of the works, we can trace actions that undermine something about the fundamental definition of the depicted objects, adding humor and surprise to their context.

The act of painting that starts with the description of objects, enables a shift in consciousness and spans the values ​​of alchemy, transformation, exchange, and complex reciprocal relationships between the painter, the painting, and its inanimate objects.

 

Participants: Dan Orimian, Sagie Azoulay, Leonid Balaklav, Raya Bruckenthal, Motta Brim, Ariel Berlatzky, Silvia Bar-Am, Shai Yehezkelli, Elkana Levi, Rotem Manor, Avi Sabah, Yonat Cintra, Adi Ivry, Eliyahu Fatal, Avigail Fried, Natan Pernic, Elad Rosen, Amir Shefet

 

Curator: Ella Cohen Vansover

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