Untitled (162) Painting

The ground crumbles away and reveals the space beyond. This is the situation depicted in my recent work. The ground is represented by the most common of Israeli floor tiles, created from a variety of stones and cement pieces. In the paintings the pieces also include the fossils of shells. The pieces that are meant to adhere to each other are disintegrating instead. In some of the paintings, daily objects such as a teaspoon or a cup of coffee rest on the tiles - as representatives of human presence or culture. In others, signs of life appear in the form of the fossils or a spider's web. The bottom layer in all the paintings is the sky; it's an upside-down process. The basis of things is falling apart, gradually disappearing, and the sky appears, as a gaping void. I try to create a pictorial allegory in my paintings by combining realistic images. They are frozen theatrical scenes, or stories without words that have no need of "translation." Although the images are painted quite realistically, I try to keep my paintings "fresh," graphically speaking, so that the action of painting is discernible in the final result.