place; in contemporary usage, the
Latin expression which formerly
meant “local deity” now refers to
the essence or soul of a place. The
artworks in the exhibition genius
loci are not manifestos, but they
do act in the world. They operate
in the silence between notes, not
necessarily referring to a specific
landscape, but indeed to a place.
Eleanor Ray is an American painter
who captures infinite expanses in
her small-scale paintings, which fill
the eye. Her exquisite precision and
bold placement of colors create
a system in perfect equilibrium.
Waterscapes and a field face viewers
confidently and calmly, overflowing
what is contained in the viewer’s
gaze.
The void dominates Mosh Kashi’s
fields, as if their moment were
that of an early stage of creation
after the primordial waters were
separated into heavens and seas.
The gaze hovers over the works and
celebrates the immutable presence
of their emptiness.
The haystack in the foreground
of Yehuda Armoni’s painting is
cradled in art historical memory,
between Jean-François Millet’s The
Gleaners (1857) and Claude Monet’s
Haystacks (1890-91). The richness
of the paintings from a different
century and a different locale adds
a subtle layer of meaning in a
place where the constant threat of
desertification lurks.
Works by Uri Blayer, Tali Navon
and Hadar Gad touch upon, but are
not limited to the Israeli present.
“Grey Valley” by Blayer depicts the
Huleh Valley, a place steeped in the
Zionist national myth; the city seen
in the background is Kiryat Shmona,
named for the eight who fell in
the battles for Tel Hai. The Huleh
swamp was drained in the 1950s
as a national project, regarded as a
modern bettering of the land that
dramatically altered the ecological
balance and the genius loci. Part of
the swamp was revived in the ‘90s
in an artificial process, creating a site
whose symbolic importance marked
a pivotal moment in the Israeli
attitude to environmental issues and
to the exercising of power. Blayer’s
painting is both ambivalent and
enigmatic, containing the present
as well as the memory of the past,
wound and balm.Tali Navon’s video is a collage of
images, the yearning for an ideal
Nature crossed with a look at
Habima Square in Tel Aviv (designed
by Dani Karavan). The square has an
official state character, blazing white,
exposed and barren. Nature in the
square is but a nostalgic memory,
out of context: it is a landscaped
garden shaped as a memory of
open spaces now threatened by
construction. The layered images in
the video are imbued with a deep
feeling of disruption. Underneath
Habima Square is a protective
security space and a spacious bomb
shelter, structures required by
law, concealed spaces forming an
underground asylum seeping into
the seemingly safe reality above.Hadar Gad’s painting of Kibbutz
Ein Harod’s cemetery encodes local
landscape elements. In her painting
of this secular pilgrimage site, she
works with the angle of encounter
between irrigation pipes, exposed
ground, heaps of leaves and foliage
climbing up cypresses. The attempt
to control Nature is blunt, yet