Through the frozen language of painting, Anat Betzer is grasping on the attempt to depict structures of movement, of the indescribable: wind, clouds in the sky, vapor, like fire, like water. It is almost a heroic effort to cross into the transcendental dimension of the eternal hunting fields, into a place about which nothing more can be said. With a slow, meticulous, and highly detailed painting motion, Betzer depicts the figure of a woman turning her back, a woman in the stabbing heart, growing, swirling in every direction. It is a beauty that seeks to hold the dynamic, that will vanish in another moment, that will be though as it never was, merging into the movement of transformation within an infinite nature, becoming other in a light moment.
The concealment of the face appears in this series in a slightly different manner than in Betzer’s previous series (Back Mind, Noga Gallery, 2023), in which the woman’s hair was tied, braided, and held in place. Here, it exists also as body, as a garment, as Lot’s wife stepping (escaping) there, her face turned toward a wild background, like the flight of her hair echoing in the clouds. This is a woman who seeks to dissolve into the great skies, who wishes to merge with the chaos of the clouds – or perhaps, one who’s fleeing from the terror of the reality outside the painting.
This is an operatic visual drama, in which – as in Munch’s paintings – the figure reverberates in the distant landscape. It is an audiovisual frequency in which the far outside emerges from the inside, always, always. “The Scream” spreads across the painting, across the space of the world, in waves upon waves.
In Betzer’s paintings, the delicate relationship between the tiny and close and the vast and monumental is always present. Her paintings are meditative resonances of this relationship – perhaps a version of the silent scream of the world’s sorrow.
In the exhibition, there are also three small works in which the absent faces face forward with an eyeless, blank expression. With their backs turned to the stormy landscape, young women seemingly gaze ahead, their faces cut and shadowed, their hair tied, necklaces on their necks. What does this turn mean? What is the meaning of this seemingly reversed motion?
The necklaces, like strings of candy, may suggest a new rhythm, another taste, a different time. These are the same women, always alone, maybe before, maybe after. The vulnerability that characterizes the woman seen from behind is replaced here by the force of directness – like the force of nature (the clouds) surrounding her. These silent portraits are the counterpoint to the grand and awe-striking exterior paintings of landscapes and skies, functioning within the gallery space as a static anchor, a key or stabilizing footnote, a kind of frozen weight, a still life that is both point of departure and point of return to the still-living.
This is the silenced place of sober awareness: here is the boundary – the inherent limitations of the medium of painting since forever: flatness, stillness, the non- movement in time, the historical challenge or struggle of the medium that had never fulfilled its own death – how to set an event in motion, to propose a visual stillness that nevertheless holds an event within and against the restricting lines.
She walks away, she stands before the rye field, I no longer see her face, it is turned toward the field, and then I see it again, unchanged. She gazed at the setting sun, at the rye field in flames.
Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein
“Unlike ideology, paintings say nothing. They only strive toward truth,” said Gerhard Richter, whose cloud paintings also crashed upon this rock of paradox, striving to capture the mutable, to discipline, to weave what exists into a chain of logic, or knowledge.
Anat Betzer dwells within this place, carving pearls of beauty and mystery from painting to painting in a sisyphean struggle toward the impossible, one that slips through the fingers, that stands before us as an enigma, as magic.
