At first, the paintings seem abstract – wide shots of diffuse, saturated, or dilutedstains –like an aerial view, satellite images, or perhaps a map that offers an abstract representation of the terrain. At second glance, the abstract space comes into focus and becomes clearer. The eye skips from site to site and starts recognizing figurative images: snowy ridges, steep slopes, serpentine creeks, or possibly tangles of thin capillaries and open cuts of bleeding paint. A more careful look reveals small figures and other concrete images scattered in the torn landscape –figures in action, events that offer a foothold of sorts.

The work process is completely bare and exposed. Washing, squeezing, cutting, pasting, brushwork, drawing. But despite its unplanned nature, it also seems considerably controlled. Further treatment instills meaning in the accidental. Random stains, cracks in the paint, a faded wash – all these serve as the starting point for deliberate interventions. Pieces of canvas cut from one painting are pasted onto another, but also reworked and integrated into the space, elevating it like a topographic map. From a different perspective, these supposed ridges, these strips of canvas, these patches look like bandages meant to heal the wounded, bleeding surface; to mend the blemishes inflicted on the landscape. And in-between there are pauses. Empty, quiet, seemingly “undone” areas, territories formed by their own concealment.

Wandering past the works may generate a sense of disorientation, in the absence of anchoring elements to hold on to. One’s ability to be in uncertainties, mystery, and doubts is a “negative capability,” wrote the Romantic English poet John Keats in one of his most quoted letters. How can a negative be considered a capacity? Keats understood that any good artwork feeds on these “adverse” ingredients. Where there is no silence there is no sound.

A Woman Who Stopped

In the end, it is about movement. Like the movement that leaves the text open-ended, as if to signify the transcendence of time, the distortion inherent in the linear sequence. The annals of time begin with a different ending, and what takes place in us moves in opposite directions, stopping at the moment of being christened as an image. And here, we have a woman who stopped, and more than once. She confers her consonants on whoever is interested, in order to say something about the strength needed to be passive. This is her natural language, her diction, if you like. Her ideological movement is the movement of consonants, and in order to take the helm with her lips she must rub against edges, embody passive and active states, action and passion, man and woman.

For her past is strewn with beds, riddled with previously registered prostrations. “She is lying down, he stands up”, writes Hélène Cixous. “She arises – end of the dream – what follows is sociocultural: he makes her lots of babies, she spends her youth in labor; from bed to bed…”[i] What shall we do with this woman who insists on stopping in motion? The streams of water moisten her organs, whispering: “You have long been dispossessed of yourself,” but a recalcitrant habit makes her stretch up her legs, turning the crucifixion gesture on its head.

Her body rests on the cool floor with her arms spread out, like in an emergency instruction manual she once saw, warning against being trapped in quicksand. The head is bent back, the arms float, and only the legs are already sunk deep in the downsucking force. Surrender as a first, vital resort.

Now she pulls out her legs from the grip of the everyday and uses them to outline, almost unawares, a new vertical order. Her body delineates two contradictory paths – a perpendicular, structuring, organizing, hierarchical dimension, tolerating no interruption and containing all she knows, and a horizontal, expanding, all-encompassing dimension that contains her secret. Her confidants know the rebellion embodied in a rising which is not an erection, but an ever continuous, changing, diffusive flow.

How wicked is the joy that permeates her, her unseen gaze trained on her toes, become a horizon. She can almost speak, get reacquainted with the efficiency workers that gulp up the spaces of her life, generate the role reversal, the hovering that will be their lot. She teaches them to hold what is stronger than her, like a wave she has learned to tame, inhaling air into her lungs as if she were newly born.

In the end, it is about movement.

Dalit Matatyahu

[i] Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 66.

In her new exhibition, Sea of Galilee, Orly Maiberg returns to the sea.  But the sea is not the same sea.  It is not the expressionist, devouring sea, nor the gentle twilight sea of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, so familiar to us from her earlier exhibitions.  This is the Sea of Galilee with its religious, cultural and national symbolism as well as a mecca for sports, holidays, fun.

What begins as the popular sporting event of swimming across as a means of instilling in us a feeling of common national goals –- so precisely described by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbaum –- suddenly changes.  It turns into defeat, persecution, escape, exile, into a search for a safe haven

The swimmers who begin their trek as sport become nothing but nameless survivors in its midst. They are crowded on rafts, elbowing one another on makeshift boats, trying to escape to an unknown future.  Their identity – if they have one – is given to them in the form of their number in the competition, whose rules have changed and now it is nothing but a trap.  The shores of the Sea of Galilee are not the shore that is visible on the horizon, nor the shore that is left behind, but a parallel shore – undesired one.

We leave them thus, abandoned to their fate, men and women with their roots in water, a mass, moving from here to there, from there to here.

– Ilana Bernstein