Current Exhibition
Luminaries
18.7.24 - 13.9.24
“And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; and the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1, 16-18)
Luminaries
Hagai Argov & Ronen Siman Tov
18.7.24-13.9.24
Curator: Gavriel Engel
Text: Ronen Siman Tov
Hagai Argov & Ronen Siman Tov exhibit new artworks in various techniques and mediums which deal with light in the metaphysical way. This isn’t the Baroque light the comes from Chiaroscuro’s play of light and shadow, but the light that arrives from inside the artwork and crosses the painterly surface.
In Argov’s artworks the white paint is the source of light. A neutral cold light. A light of grief and purification, of emptying and filling-up, life and death in a mythical-ceremonial manner.
In Siman Tov’s artworks the light reaching from inside is present in the transition from a blindingly bright yellow, toxic and charged – ‘yellow time’- to the purple and green, enlightening and healing. Colors of sanctity and natural order.
On the conceptual level, the artists collect pieces of plywood from the discards of woodworkers in industrial areas. Hagai attaches and glues together wood pieces into an object: an archeological assemblage that creates an everchanging direction, as a three-dimensional drawing painted in whitewash and on it a primitivistic drawing of a human head or body part. Ronen collects wood pieces in various sizes that define the space in which the painterly scenes are occurring at – empty landscapes, a number of figures in an infinite space, unraveled paths and roads, a stuck convoy and figures on a boat perhaps fishermen perhaps terrorist.
The exhibition is compiled of artworks in small intimate formats which accompany the existential journey of the artists as an attempt to ‘hold on to the shrub’ “and God set them in the sky… to divide the light from the darkness” in a manner of creating order in the chaos of the spatial reality in which we live.
