Communication
Past Exhibition
18.05.2006 - 16.06.2006
Communication – relation – language
This exhibition deals with the link between two mediums in the field of visual arts, one traditional – painting, and the other more modern – photography. Painting may be defined by some as “low-tech”, yet highly emotional; while photography, in comparison, “high-tech” and technical.
The connection between a painter and a photographer who have never cooperated before is an attempt to dismantle the sensitive and highly complex issue – are there really any conceptual differences between these two arts from the viewer’s perspective. Even back in the caveman days there was a connection between the cave world and the outside world through documentation painted on the walls of the cave. This language, painting, was probably also the medium through which cavemen could express their impressions of the world around the tribal fire. A language was formed around the fire which evolved, in its various reincarnations, into the language we feed from nowadays. Indeed languages are different and versatile but there is something similar the feeds us in every language – the visual dimension.
In every site world wide, when the photographer photographs a flower we can see and understand what’s going on. The same can be said in the case of a painter painting a scenic view – we totally understand the message he wishes to deliver to us viewers. When we see the changing pictures on television we recognize and understand, almost immediately, what it’s all about. The two exhibiting artists in this exhibition, Hagai Argov and Amir Weinberg, deal with communication and the visual language.
Amir Weinberg has been dealing with the documentation of the moment for years in his job as a journalist photographer. At the same time he paints with his camera moments that examine the relationship between the person and his environment. In his journeys through Israel and overseas he carries his camera like a painter who carries his sketch book, and takes pictures. With inconceivable obsess he creates the photographic frame that provides the viewer with a new concept of the visible and invisible in nature. The concept of light and space created by Amir offers the viewer a brand new world, sometimes hallucinated and sometimes accurate. The outcome presents the viewer with a new story about an old issue.
Hagai Argov is a painter who photographs momentarily situations within the sphere between the obvious and the hallucinated. Argov, who was born in Tivon, is an artist whose childhood’s landscapes and light escort his work even today, yet these release intense rage and cynicism of the artist living in an urban world.
Argov’s character paintings include no pastoral or tranquility. His self portrait presents him as having alien ears stretched on a canvas with spiky pegs stretching him to the point of explosion. The characters of Israeli footballers and businessmen standout in their blurry and come out of the almost metallic background of the color on the canvas.
Argov uses a lot of Ready Made in his paintings. These are some sort of a commercial product that wraps our everyday environment. This urban “junk” is transformed by Argov into his painting’s bed. This leads to the new ready made, the internet, at an age where the Ready Made surrounds every moment of our lives and need not be searched for. Pornography is an essential part of this environment, and Argov uses it. He records the pornographic scenes as a Ready Made product that represents the age of internet. These scenes are presented by him as a reflection, as a peephole exhibit in the style of the central bus station area: the vulgar sex dungeons of life in the city, of the cursing of drivers and football fans and of insensitivity to the issue of human trade.
