Oct. 10, 2011 - Dec. 24, 2011
What’s in the Menu, 2011, Acrylic on canvas
Untitled, 2011, Acrylic on canvas
Coin, 2011, Acrylic on canvas
Bong Reaction 1, 2010
Bong Reaction 2, 2010, Acrylic on canvas
Untitled, 2010, Acrylic on canvas
In his painterly work Avner Ben-Gal prefers dispersing and melting configurations of bodies and spaces in a spastic state of vanishing boundaries, contours and identity. His works raise basic cognitive dilemmas related to the representational capacity of the painted image and the viewing subject. The world picture conveyed by Ben-Gal’s works exemplifies an undefined state of matter and visibility. The things lose their distinctiveness and blend into transformative processes and destabilized space. The space is folded and unfolded as if by a storm spreading what can be perceived simultaneously as fog, wind, smoke, sand, salt and snow.
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Ben-Gal’s image oscillates between painterly elements–surface, line, stain–melding into a climactic figurative representation, and the image’s disintegration back into its constituents. It suggests a changing signifier, an active vibration. In each painting this movement is cyclical: we recognize fragments as a signifier, yet at the very moment of recognition the signifier eludes us once again. There is a correspondence between the what and how of depiction: the disintegrated image crystallizes into an explicit image, which iteslf depicts a world in the midst of disintegration–natural disaster, war and violent sex. Ben-Gal’s painting is driving, and driven by, a violent world filled with narcotic hallucinations, with cognitive and moral disorientation and blindness. This persistent lack of fixity enables it to exist outside the symbolic order, outside the visible layer of culture and law, thus revealing their repressed underpinnings. In this sense, Ben-Gal contends with the primal violence that precedes the formulation and imposition of law, during which the latter’s image emerges, only to disintegrate afterward
Courtesy of the Artist and Igal Ahouvi Art Collection
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