Cronos

Mosh Kashi / Cronos

Opening: 30/03/2006   Closing: 12/05/2006

Cronos, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2006
Cronos, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2006
Cronos, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2006
Small blurred leaves oil on canvas, 20x20cm, 2006
Sintra, oil on canvas, 90x140cm, 2006
Cronos, oil on canvas, 210x110cm, 2006
Cronos 2, oil on canvas, 80x120cm, 2005-2006
Crimson tree, oil on canvas, 60x40cm, 2005
Dark tree , oil on canvas, 40x100cm, 2006

My new cycle of works opens yet another chapter that deals with nature and flora not as a record but as a document that engages emotions on physical as well as mental levels.

 

Dark fields, black trees, thickets spread as a torn sheet exposing the hidden light and the background, hallucinatory trees and shadows, golden porcelain balls (that will not be exhibited) coated with pure gold, and balls with meticulously painted twigs.

 

Darkness as a substance provides the axis in this body of works. The horizon, the link between land and sky and the pale light that flickers like a pearl define the wide shadowy fields and the dark saturated sky above them.

 

A significant part of those works are the black fields (Cronos); heavy and charged, they linger as a black thick mist marking the horizon in the gallery space. The viewer moves from a black field to a green shadow, back to a dark tree and then to an endless thicket of green twigs through which glints an infinite space.

 

There are other works with bare sprigs on a dark background illuminated by the faint night light; they break up the dark space reaching to the bottom of darkness which is light (Sintra).

 

The dark, hallucinatory trees on a red background (Crimson) are far away in a red, hot atmosphere – the red, thick air wraps the lone tree that merges with the horizon of the heavy earth. The dark trees seem like stakes in the first light of dawn or the last light of day, or pines, dark with their thick and mysterious branches.

 

These works do not express the concrete, earthly plane of nature, but rather refer to mental imagery like the dark, weightless air that touches the heavy earth on a blurry horizon.

 

The blurred leaves and the almost hallucinatory branches become an allegory to the feelings of void and reality; together they reveal a fractal space free of cultural prescriptions. This reality is a fractal, a unique shape born again and again, eternally.

Bois

Mosh Kashi / Bois

Opening: 09/01/2003   Closing: 14/02/2003

Bois, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Bois, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Bois, Exhibition view, Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, 2003
Field, oil on canvas, 160x160cm, 2003
Early Crimson tree, oil on canvas, 60x60cm, 2001
Svach, oil on canvas, 80x80cm, 2003
Weeping willow light #1, oil on canvas, 80x80cm, 2003
Purple Dawn (Diptych), Oil on Canvas, 2x60x60cm, 2003

An initial mapping of Mosh Kashi’s new works reveal a preoccupation with two principal groups of paintings. The first, lacking any painterly point of gravity creates a sort of symmetrical construction – a division of space in the direction of abstract dealing with the sublime. (The Fields, and The Sky of Darkness and Light) The second group refines the subject of painting to an essence that creates a clear and absolute point of gravity, sometimes autonomous without space or specific place. (The Horns, The Thicket, and the Embalmed Series).

 

The works from the Fields series detour the concrete place and time. More than they reveal the landscape, they create “Gestures of Landscapes” or essences of landscapes that rely on landscape and reality. The barren fields with the coloring of camouflaged animal furs expose the illusion created by the multiplication of the dense plants, stretching out with no landmarks, like a soft fur spread from here to there. The fields appear like a meta-spatial and meta-temporal fractal.

 

On the line of the horizon – skies thick and saturated as if stopped by a thread of hair that barely holds back the meeting of sky and earth. This charging of a meeting between living plants that confront the lifeless empty sky that is as heavy as lead reveals the fundamental duality at the base of this painting that contains sensual strata that vary between one life environment to another.

 

In the series The Sky of Darkness and Light the mass of darkness, thick and opaque heavily lies across most of the painting and only a vague line creates a hallucinary border between darkness and light. A sort of image of the creation of the division of sky and land, water and sky. This series creates an affinity to photography. At the different stages of the development of photography, at the moment when the image appears through the liquid, the critical moment is revealed that inscribes the meeting of light and darkness. This moment is the heart of the painting, creating a specific-mental weight that cannot be measured. This is created through knowledge, intuition, from the image of division between two air materials. The one, light and soft, and the other thick and dense.

 

The series of trees in The Embalmed on green boards echo the flattened appearance of plants that have been pressed between pages of books in an attempt to save them. The plant’s physiognomy necessary for passing on the truth is completely destroyed even though the morphological characters still remain. These trees bestow the sense that they have been embalmed in the silence, in a green darkness. Floating in dark forest-green as if it was their preserving fluid or at least a memory of their color. These trees are naked of any green leaves or sign of life, they create a sort of gentle colorful etching of a dry skeleton, a sort of dumb ornamentation.
And opposite them, the Thicket works, which invade the sides of the painting from every place and to every place. They create their own dynamic abstract and depth. The ball of thicket cannot be disentangled. The thicket blocks the viewer’s gaze. Using their sharp focus these works confront the abstractions of fields and skies and sharpen the concept of “private proportions,” the autonomy of every work.

 

From series to series the possibilities are articulated. The attempt to refine, to purify, to leave traces. The memory of density and the great charge that is discharged and turned into the abstract, to no where and no time. Apparently.