Old Monastery, Umbria Painting

Dr. Gideon Ofrat on Walls and Voices Catalogue I have looked over the photographs of the paintings that you sent me. These are amazingly beautiful paintings, masterpieces of composition, harmony and spirituality. Inspired by them, I began to compose in my head an article that I would write for the catalogue, and I pondered the version - stone + light - that Anna Ticho had bequeathed to the paintings of Jerusalem since the 1930s. Later, I reviewed in my mind the paintings of the sparkling walls drawn by Yehoshua Grossbard of Haifa; the series of Jerusalem walls in their transcendental silence, drawn by Michael Gross; and even the walls of the houses in Gaza drawn by Michael Kovner. And specifically in comparison to all these, I felt the power and uniqueness of your paintings. I am well aware of the covenant between simplicity, superficiality and a wall. Your current paintings derive from an empirical look at reality, but they confirm simplicity, and it is better this way - they cancel out the seeming contrast between superficiality and realism. The experience of viewing them shakes the eye and the soul between the closed (half a dark window, a locked blue gate, a shaded door) and the open (such as blurring / welding / melting the concrete - the balcony railing, for example, in airy abstractness). The soul and the eye dart back and forth between the geometrical (flat, and sometimes even cubic, walls and architectural units) and the organic - the free vegetation. It seems that the series of paintings at hand is placing metaphysical dualism, not to mention religious, between the rational regulation of the world and the chaotic; between the superior recognition and nature. On this level of transcendentalism, I found myself fascinated by the blocked entrance, which I identify in many paintings: stairs that invite us to climb to the ... doors that seem to disclose what is behind them ... balconies that seem to promise an exit to the inside of the house. But, no: your paintings confirm a great level of yearning for the secret, but the blocking of the way to the unknown. Unlike the banal chronicles of beautiful corners in Jerusalem (entrances, gates, windows, yards) - such as those that invite us to a delightful meeting with a place, your "walls and voices" say "here and no more"! and surround the hidden secret in the heaviness and silence of the stone.