galmb@comebeck.com
www.galerie-monika-beck.de | www.comebeck.com/kunstwabe

19. Januar - 26. Februar 2010

 Lavih Serfaty     

Malerei | Atrium

in situ

Bilder in situ ansehen

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1. Borderline

“...It was in the 70’s, when I had the opportunity of visiting the Sinai Desert numerous times. I was deeply influenced by the movement of light, as it fell over the dunes, rocks, villages and some isolated houses, changing their colors gradually. The desert landscapes fascinated me. I had to paint them. I wanted to decipher their structure, what they are made of. ”

Soil, Land, Territory. In a country where these words are a source of recurring conflicts, landscapes usually become dreamed places, sanctuaries actually. Painted on the borders of Israel, the aquarelles of Serfaty (born 1945, Morocco) depict the richness of colors under a Mediterranean sun. The aquarelles do not explicitly refer to war or battlefield. Instead, a painful, silent testimony echoes in the red, blazing rocks of Edom Mountains or in the scattered houses in Village on the Rocks.
“...Borders are human inventions that artificially split the course of Nature. Standing on one side of the border, I could feel the magical, healing intangibility of Nature on the other side. Landscapes became accessible to my eyes and imagination in their entirety. Only then, when I painted the villages of Lebanon and the West Bank, could I encompass both sides and reconcile between them”.

The wish for reconciliation appears in different ways in Serfaty’s art. In his aquarelles the sky and earth fuse gently and villages progressively emerge from the earth. The human presence does not interfere with Nature’s forces, but adapts and adopts its immense rhythm, becoming an integral part of it. Serfaty’s use of aquarelle colors deeply emphasizes this process of integration. The transparent colors spread out the contours and bind opposite components of the painting: they connect human constructions to Nature structures, attach a house to a mountain.

The white background on which the transparent colors are laid, functions as an inner source of light, which illuminates the whole painting from within. Serfaty recalls: “Those villages reminded me of the views of Morocco, where houses are painted white, with blue and turquoise windows, creating an impressive contrast with the reddish soil background. As the bright, glaring light altered throughout the day, it reshaped the shadows and emphasized the contrasted colors of Nature...”

The mountains of Hebron slowly emerge in front of our eyes. Little houses are quietly formed, as if created from the ground and interspersed among the myriad shapes. Serfaty’s rhythmical lines rule the pictorial space. They are crucial to the function of his paintings. Almost hieroglyphic in style, the lines shape and define the transparent aquarelle components to create a visual story. The lines also take an active part in regulating and arranging the pictorial space. They divide it into different areas such as sky or earth, “above” or “below”. The lines accumulate into topographical textures that vary in their density and direction according to the depicted area. Thus, earth is usually characterized by a highly dense rhythm, while the sky, comprising spaced lines, is perceived as a fresh, spiritual environment. In addition, the morphological rhythm of the lines conveys a feeling of movement that seems to be inherent to Nature itself: The rocks, dunes, sky, and earth are not static, but are displaying a constant process of formation and development. Therefore, even in the absence of a stated narrative, the aquarelles present a dramatic occurrence anchored in the realm of Nature.

2. An Urban Maze

The atmosphere in Serfaty’s acrylic paintings is of yet another type. He intensively populates the space of the paintings with a large number of diverse shapes, creating condensed, intricate urban landscapes. He plays with the illusion of spaciousness, placing the shapes on the foreground almost on the viewer’s plane. Here is the tamed Nature contributing its amazing colors and brightness to the urban maze. In the case of Serfaty’s acrylic paintings, the pattern revealed is an intense one, at times joyful, at times a little threatening.

While his aquarelles constantly locate human action as part of Nature’s eternal mechanism, his acrylic paintings decisively emphasize human order, presenting it as an alternative nature. The geometrical pattern of the houses, that in the aquarelles was hidden among rocks, hills, dunes and sky, now dictates the rhythm and the whole configuration of the paintings.

Light decidedly fulfills a major role in Serfaty’s paintings. Yet, while in his aquarelles the light seemed to be diffusing from within the painting, here the white color is thoroughly emphasized. As a result, it seems as though the light is being reflected onto the painting, being absorbed in its radiant hues, enlivening and softening them.

Big shapes thus fill the pictorial space from one end to the other without leaving any room for breathing. Passing by Serfaty’s “street” of paintings, the observer cannot ignore the painted windows of the houses that stare back at him from within the paintings, as if they were wide opened eyes. Their “gaze” returns ours and follows us as we move to the next house. Who lives in these houses? Is there someone peeking at us? Or is the house itself glaring back at us? Are we being invited in? Or are we given a more hostile, threatening look?

It seems that in Serfaty’s acrylics the city has its own life. The staring houses manage to express a wide range of feelings. Their presence is so dominant, that we tend to forget the people who are supposed to populate them. The impression is that it is not the people of Tel-Aviv who feel hot in Hot Summer in Tel-Aviv, but the city itself, its houses, its streets. In the same way, it is the city that is terrified in Fear in Tel-Aviv, leaving us with feeling of distress and horror.

3. Meditations

Blue. Yellow. Green.
The colors are carefully laid next to each other on this large aluminum plate. Pure and complex; radiant and at the same time deep and mysterious; three entities that are floating in space: approaching, touching, almost interacting, yet remain separated, maintaining their own identity.

The new series of Serfaty allows him to explore the very basic components of a work of art: composition, shape, color, light. From his aquarelle paintings, through the acrylic series and up to these aluminum works, Serfaty’s art demonstrates a process of reduction: reduction in composition, reduction of color and of theme. He explains: “I am still interested in the same concepts that have always fascinated me: borders versus continuity, separation versus integration, Nature phenomena versus Human creation. However, I feel that this series is the quintessence of these ideas.”

Indeed, while his aquarelle paintings represented Nature, depicting landscapes and villages, the aluminum works are not anchored in the real world. And if in the aquarelle paintings Serfaty was interested in borders between inaccessible territories, here the focus is on different kind of borders: between colors and shapes. The dynamics of Nature forces that oppose and fuse into each other is now replaced by a meditative stillness of abstract geometrical forms.

In his aluminum paintings, Serfaty creates a rigid grid that orchestrates the various components of the painting. By doing so, Serfaty puts himself again in the position of the conductor, who regulates and dictates order. He decides where one component starts and where it ends. However, the grid has a more essential role in his work. “The grid is not just a layout or an underlying design” he clarifies, “it is an inherent part of the work, and in this series, it is actually present in the work. I folded the aluminum plate and re-spread it in a process that requires physical strength. I could actually feel how the grid becomes part of the painting.” Indeed, the traces of this process cannot be ignored. Serfaty almost sculpts the grid, making his painting into a three dimensional work. As a result, the painting “invades” the real world and “participates” in it: it is affected by light and responds according to the direction of light and the way it changes throughout the day.

While in his aquarelle paintings Serfaty was observing the alternation of light throughout the day and was trying to depict its impact in his paintings, here his initial interest in light allows him to take a step forward. By making his paintings three dimensional, Serfaty seemingly installs the mechanism of light alteration in it. The three dimensional painting is now subject to an outer source of light, and is forced to change its colors as the day goes by.

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Abbildungen Lavih Serfaty ansehen

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