The Mechanical Body
The body of the artist is the body that carries the mechanical devices used to create painting. The artist’s body carries a box of consciousness, a box of information that plans all the actions embedded within the process of making a painting. The result remains obscure, open to surprise and malfunction. The idea of creating a painting as if by magic, without the intervention of the artist, is perhaps a romantic notion that still accompanies painting today.
The artists in the exhibition employ mechanical means, yet beneath the veil of visibility, or beneath the painted surface, philosophical reflections are encrypted: on multiple genres, on vision and blindness, on the personal and collective subconscious, on painting as a staining act that produces an image, on a metaphorical model in the desert of the architecture of the soul, and on painting’s failure to stir thought. The artist places themselves within a process that contains both surprise and concealment through the use of stencils, which intensify revelation upon being peeled away from the painted surface. The painting is not devoid of malfunctions; within them hides the mystical presence that lurks inside the painting. Five artists, each following a winding path saturated with enigma and secrecy. Each possesses a complex philosophy of painting and a compelling philosophy of life.
Yehudit Sasportas engages with the mapping of the personal and collective subconscious. Over the course of ten years, she created a virtual structure in a specific location in the Negev Desert, functioning as both an archaeology of the subconscious and an allegory for a three-dimensional sculptural map of the psyche. The acts of drawing, sculpture, and sound works constitute the visible and invisible core of this personal and collective subconscious space. At Bar-David Museum, Sasportas reveals for the first time a physical wall from the project Liquid Desert: Wall 13, displaced from Room 18, which was constructed as a model for the architecture of the personal and collective psyche.