Mosh Kashi's 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. 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.
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.

Project Room: Liat Yossifor

The Black Paintings - Portraits

"Each image surfaces from the concentrated labor of endless, minute brush strokes, painted with a very narrow pallet of warms and cools, shadows and highlights, the brushwork raising the skin of the painting to catch the light. However, the comprehensibility of the subtle figure is persistently interrupted by contradicting languages of redundant painterly gestures that are layered onto and into the
figure. For example; the chiaroscuro that renders the fabric of a shirt is crisscrossed with a pattern of x-shaped strokes, the volume of an arm mimed by a
pattern of curves, or a cheek flattened by a series of etch-like gestures. Within the restrictive range of the monochrome pallet, these sets of strokes literally hinder the viewing of what is already a dim image. The inconsistency between the figure and its rhythmic interruptions, and the tension between the figure and its barely differentiated background, allow and disallow it from taking form. Inevitably, the portrait pushes through the surface, not so much by its depiction in color as through the light caught in the raised surface.
These painterly disruptions are mnemonic of the stray thoughts that interrupt a continuous contemplation, when the attempt to concentrate on one thing at a time
is disrupted by the flight of drifting reflections. It is thus that Yossifor's brush strokes are structured like a mental process, where the comprehension of the main image is postponed by digressions."

An excerpt from "The Secret and the Surface" by Nitzan Shaked, 2005