Among Hofstätter’s paper works lying in the drawers of the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection, my eyes were drawn to the black sheets, which contain an entire life story. Apprehension about the darkness of spirit and morality hovers, in a thin, emaciated line, over the psyche of these drawings. Heads attached to legs, decapitated heads, repeated body parts. Detached organs, overwhelmed, take shelter in each other’s shadow, seeking relief, glinting out of the black like a white hole in an X-ray scan.
As I perused his works, I was haunted by the images produced by two other artists whose exhibitions are also currently on display in different galleries at the Museum – Pesach Slabosky and Avi Sabah, whose friendship extended across art, music, and life.
Pesach Slabosky (1947–2019) made no distinction between life and art, art and music, an artifact that he found and a painting-object that he created, the painting’s support and the painting itself. For him, the painting surface was an organic extension and expansion of his own body. On objects that he assembled from readymade pieces he stretched a canvas, which served as a kind of body skin of a painting-object. Before any painterly action took place, Slabosky’s painting surfaces were like material, corporeal creatures that harbored a rebellious and flawed beauty.
The paintings of Avi Sabah (b. 1977) are a parable of skin and bones. Their support (usually paper) acts like a skin that absorbs violent actions: incisions, scrapes, scars, tattoos, etchings, and burns – all applied to the skin-like surface, wounding it (in every sense of the word), and becoming an integral part of it.
Hofstätter, Slabosky, and Sabah do not share the same historical timeframe, nor were they molded in the same biographical and cultural realm. Nonetheless, the stretched-skin support that features in the works of all three appears to convey a similar theme, encompassing at once the physical deformation of the painting support, the painting body, and the painted body. The heat rising from Hofstätter’s scorched tar; the wild, muddy, and lumpy massiveness that emerges from Slabosky’s painting-object; the sea foam and smoky ash that flare off Sabah’s painting, all reveal the potency and impotence that co-exist in an entity that is (also) flawed. The body, even when wounded, does not relinquish its desires or destiny. It has libido, hunger, and inner strength, that push it out of its own skin.
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