“Articles lost. What makes the very first glimpse of a village, a town, in the landscape so incomparable and irretrievable is the rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit has not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape vanishes at a stroke, like the façade of a house as we enter it. It has not yet gained preponderance through a constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way about, that earliest picture can never be restored.”

“Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,” Walter Benjamin, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1968.

In July 2023, my exhibition Nohow On, Again On was presented at the Ticho House – a site-specific painting installation, some of which was created on-site. The work covered nearly the entirety of two main gallery walls and reached up, clinging to the ceiling.

By the time it returned to the studio, the work had grown significantly in scale. For a long time, it sat there like a beached whale, entombed in a museum-labeled cardboard box, blocking the studio entrance, and serving as a persistent reminder of how I was ignoring it.

After October 7^th, I felt estranged in the studio. My playlists changed – now I listened mostly to Hebrew songs as a way of reorienting myself, counting every sharp, dense day with Another Day, a Matti Caspi song, with lyrics by Rachel Shapira:

“In its sharpness,
Another day, another day.
In its density,
Another day, another day.

To neither diminish nor escape,
Always striving to move on.
Moving on means: not walking away.”

Until one day, I unpacked the huge painting and spread it out on the studio floor.

My workspace was now covered by twenty-five square meters of canvas with winding edges, appearing boundless. I started marking and defining rectangular and square territories across the painted surface. With a sharp knife and heavy tailor’s scissors I cut small windows deep into the multilayered canvas. Day after day, I extracted fragments of landscapes, small figures, and abstract color fields.

The whole was now replaced by its parts, details and close-ups of events. I extracted 40 compositions I wanted to preserve and continued working on some of these, gluing and covering, repairing some torn parts, and ripping others.

The work on the studio floor remained punctured, with a disintegrated skeleton at its center.

That’s the way it is.

**

In the large paintings, a core of life is revealed—a remnant of destruction and erasure, or perhaps a hint of what is yet to grow.

Or maybe it is “the picture that can never be restored,” as Walter Benjamin put it.

Translated from Hebrew: Danii Amir