Mosh Kashi, Ash Dreamer, Oil on Canvas, 2014
Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art is pleased to present a new solo show by Mosh Kashi, ASH DREAMER, consisting of a distinguished and diverse series of works created over the past four years in oil on canvas.
The exhibition title ASH DREAMER, reveals a great deal of Kashi’s painting stance in recent years which presumes that the innocent gaze on a place or a view and its primal and savage nature, will always be charged with the viewer’s subconscious, conscious, and personal feelings.
In his new exhibition, Kashi intensifies and enhances his profound artistic practice, examining the immensity of nature in its different aspects, both visual and mental: wild fields spread out from one horizon to the next, lonely trees rooted in a wide open and barren space, great dark mountains and thickets painted with great precision. All illustrated in a light neither of day, nor of night.
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Mosh Kashi, born in Jerusalem in 1966. Bachelor’s degree from Ha’Midrasha School of Art (1987), MFA graduate at Burton Hall University Leeds, UK (2000).
Kashi has participated in solo and group exhibitions both in Israel and abroad. Two artist books were published on his work, in 2006 and 2012.
Mosh Kashi exhibits meticulous oil on canvas paintings, loaded with suspense and inward concentration. Kashi’s metaphoric world goes the distance into an undefined space of botanical imagery, gloomy fields and nocturnal spaces. Kashi builds a world of stylized nature from thickets of splitting branches to barren field landscapes. A series of small fields that portray an ivory light in the core of the sky, a brief aperture- a light opening and capturing a glimpse of the great body of nature.
With a virtuoso brush technique Kashi has developed the thicket image- an endless entanglement and splitting of branches, leafless and grey. The thicket is dense, prickly and illuminated from within the darkness. The nature in his drawings is not natural and flowing, but rather frozen and tangled. Side by side, lunar landscapes in which the light flows, or darkness accumulates, giving it a meditative suspense.
Human presence is reduced from Kashi’s paintings in a symbolic way, to the gaze of the outside viewer, busy deciphering the tensed events of the painting. The contact of darkness and light induces in his works an undefined time-sense which is neither day nor night, dusk or dawn. The vague light which falls on the dark fields, the measured lighting that exposes a field part delicate as fine hair in a sudden flash of first or last light, the twigs flickering from the dark green thicket, carrying an allegory of the paintings light source as the skies hanging on an endless dawn.
The paintings in this exhibition indeed offer a deeply rooted affinitiy to romantic painting but also wishe to examine the objects of painting, in the saturated light, the fertile material, the object of desire concealed in the ordered appearance of things