A Sliver of Light

Orit Livne’s thicket, like the skyscapes she paints, resonates with foreign scents, but the darkness of the paint with which she covers the white canvas, is inspired by the thickness of the all so familiar Jerusalem forest. Livne’s paintings grow from double roots, both biographical and conceptual; from blackening for the sake of exposure. The work process in the studio begins with covering the canvas in black, blue, or sepia. Only then does the artist expose the initial whiteness of the canvas, layer by layer, as in an archaeological excavation. By erasing and absorbing the excess oil paint, she separates the broad dabs, setting heaven and earth apart; she polishes the rough skin of the canvas to reveal its bright light. On the one hand, the artist obscures some of the details that sink into the painting, and on the other, she extracts the bright sections that sprout from amidst the layers of paint. According to Victor Hugo, “form is the essence brought to the surface.” Throughout the painting’s layers, in the depth as well as on the surface, Livne’s fascination with the light is evident. Would it be far-fetched to say that it is the fascination with light, with a sliver of light, that drives her work?

At early sunrise as at sunset, from scenes of a walk in the Jerusalem Forest as from past memories of a childhood landscape, Livne’s paintings are impressions initially absorbed in the body, which are subsequently revealed on the white paper. “Only birds of passage know, perhaps — / As they hang between heaven and earth — / This pain of two homelands. // With you I have been planted twice, / With you I have grown, Pines, / And my roots are in two different landscapes.” Like the pine tree in Leah Goldberg’s poem, which is uprooted and replanted, Livne’s painting, too, is a hymn to the light revealed from the darkness; a mark left that cannot be erased.

Judith Anis