noga gallery

Mosh Kashi

Bois*
9.1.03 - 14.2.03

Click here for c.v and more works

About the exhibition

An initial mapping of Mush 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.

*From the French: antlers, forest, thicket.

Asnat Austerlitz - Athletes

Project Room 9.1.03 - 14.2.03

Osnat Austerlitz, born 1969, is a graduate of the photography department at the Hadassah College, Jerusalem, and is presently studying for her M.F.A. at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. In this exhibition she is showing four works from The Athletes series and two new video works in the Project Room.
Stills photography, the cinema and video have exposed human senses to a collection of powerful stimuli that the human eye was previously unable to identify or understand. They caused a change in the relational system and in the forms of perception between the consciousness and the world. Human time is not just another single perceptual time - it is governed by the time of technological mechanisms. The expansion of sensual perception through these machines on the one hand opened the borders of the human world, while on the other, made the eye more vulnerable. The technology transformed from being an instrument in the hands of the sensual system to a tool against which one must be protected from its own effects.
Osnat Austerlitz, in the past both a dancer and sportswoman, has for a number of years recorded, sampled, and processed images from personal sport's competitions broadcast on television. She uses the photographic and television medium in order to reproduce and change "reality" and to charge it with new meanings. Austerlitz examines systems of relations between reality and its representation as well as the critical gaze regarding the "strong person: represented by the athlete. This concept is important in our society, a society that sees the value of life through the paradoxical prism of survival and sacrifice. Austerlitz examines the human image in relation to the athlete's uncompromising desire for achievement and to the immense stress place on his or her body, the extremes it is taken to - almost to the point of mutation.
In her works Austerlitz deals with motifs of time and movement.* This focus crosses a number of levels: the concrete time of a sporting event measured in seconds, in a tenth of a second its "life" span is short, measured, limited, and cruel. Alternatively, the movement represents the aesthetics of the body, of effort and strength.
* Edward Muybridge was the first to attempt to show movement in the early days of photography using serial photography. His photographs were seen as "scientific" since they capture the stages of movement or details of objects unseen to the naked eye (for example works such as Horse in Motion, Man with Hoe, or Woman Descending Stairs).