“When I was a child, I used to catch the fish in the river with my hands. I was fascinated by their movement, their speed, how they sparkled, their colors. That was exactly what I wanted to catch in my hands.”

(Constantin Brancusi, “Conversations with Brancusi”, p. 46)

In his new cycle of works, Mosh Kashi expands his pictorial research and explores painting techniques and outlooks in surprising and dynamic large-scale works. The exhibition comprises several series of paintings, each invites the viewer to look from a different point of reference. This time, nature serves as a catalyst for an exploration of cosmic phenomena, while the studio acts as the connecting link in the transformation that they go through before they reach the painted canvas.

The central series in the exhibition is Light Particles. This series serves as an index of Mosh Kashi’s earlier painting processes, which consisted mainly of isolating objects from nature around him and placing them at the center of the canvas, keeping to a minimal color palette, and creating a world that has no place or time. Whereas in this series the gaze turns to look at the celestial sphere, examining the speed and frequency of celestial bodies through pictorial subjects whose visible characteristics are energy and movement, refracted light, and sudden bursts that glimpse fleetingly, following their own routine and structure.

At the same time, a series of panoramic paintings that explore mass and weight through a colorful relationship in paintings of light and darkness complements the sharpness of the Light Particles series. The painting’s appearance is dictated by the misty image, the slow, almost imperceptible heavy movement of the mass of light and darkness.

The third series of works focuses on dense construction of a colorful range as an expression of painting abstraction. The presence of color in this series manifests itself with flashes of color waves, capturing layers of bright light and total darkness, as if they were the essence of the blue sky spectrum.

Each series in the new cycle of paintings is executed in a different method that indicates the totality of phenomena in the universe. At the same time, it also illuminates the possibility that the pictorial tactic in this instance distills natural phenomena and gives them an independent entity, one that is separate from the cosmic space, an action that conjures up the studio as a parallel universe governed by its own orders.

Reality outside the studio and the illusion of painting in the studio underscore the differences between them but at the same time also allow the cosmic moment to take shape through painting as an imaginary existence of a visual formulation.

Mosh Kashi’s solo exhibition includes an impressive body of work created from Kashi’s consistent pictorial research in recent years. For the first time, we witness a sharp color turn that goes beyond the color scale that characterized Kashi’s previous works, along with a shift to panoramic and round formats – moves that lead the show to new realms.

The exhibition includes meticulous oil painting and subjects that have become identified with Kashi’s themes, the nature and the universe in all its cosmic elements: the cycles and the one-off events captured in the painting, like a photographic snap-shot.

The constant tension between the trivial and the sublime in Kashi’s paintings receives additional expressions in these works, in which a large-scale universe converges into circular formats with refined color palette where only a tiny glimmer of light from the darkness indicates the possibility of an infinite space around. In the large-scale works, a reversal – a tiny horizon point becomes a monumental panorama.

The large and small formats complement each other and merge into a harmonious show in the exhibition space, creating the possibility of capturing the random and the ephemeral into a pictorial reality. Kashi’s perception of painting is an open invitation to an imagined encounter between the viewer’s consciousness and the painting mystery.