Gilad Efrat – Works 2004

Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armor of an enemy knight.
After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (1)

The exhibition is held in three spaces:
The display window: through a slit in the covered window a self-portrait painting can be seen; the main room: a group of works in various dimensions, all oil pastel on paper. The small room upstairs: three paintings, oil on linen, depicting Ansaar Prison after a photograph by Roi Kuper (Roi made a series of images of the prison in April 2002).

In the territorial games of the gallery space, images of the prison are squeezed into a small backroom. Images charged with political and public meaning simultaneously demonstrate the power of the concrete space, and the mental prison: a labyrinth of restrained expressivity.
In contrast with this space, the oil pastels express yet more persuasively the expansion of mass when it grips concrete images, a kind of faceless body, a type of realistic look at a fragment, a piece of skin, or a peek into the inner body.

The images of the prison do not let go, and like an open eye in the gallery space, they give silent witness to the symbiotic relationship between private and public space.

(1) The story is taken from Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) by Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso.