“Clearing-Stones”

The small sized Basalt stones presented in Goren’s current sculpture exhibition were carefully gathered by Goren from the banks of a field in lower Galili. The stones used as a primal substance, on which he combines the natural act of creation with the craft of man. Goren creates upon these stones some sort of a connection between the ancient past and the present, bringing them to life with hints of narratives and refined symbolism.

About the exhibition – Clearing – Stones

…
Darkened, without choice
all might begin in stone
the existent substance and surrounding.
That which gives birth only to itself
‘notices things of this sort’
demands our attentiveness
even to the most obstinate of his distresses.Translated section from “Wessex” by Nathan Zach, Northern Eastern, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1979Ilan Goren’s current exhibition presents small scaled Basalt rocks, Clearing-Stones which he gathered with great care from the borders of an agricultural field in the lower Galilee. These Basalt stones – these common extrusive volcanic rocks, which are emitted and consolidated on the surface of the earth, these hard, dark rocks, impenetrable in their unity, sealed within themselves, monumental and belligerent, are one of the most common materials for memorial sculptures. Goren uses these rocks as a crude and primal substance, upon which the nature’s creation is combined with the work of the sculpture, striving to release the stone from its anonymity and to bestow upon her a new identity. The stones were selected for a certain expressive potential hidden inside them, and were brought into Goren’s studio during the summer. Along a west period of time, as if in some sort of a experimental lab, the stones have invited the artist to add to them and combine within them other materials, which rift them out of their former monumental and fixed context, combining in them a new more intimate presence, as some kind of a private and inverted expression of the substance hidden inside the closed natural shape of the stone. In some way, this intimate presence abolishes the primal material reality of the stone which was pushed onto the surface of the earth, functioned as a border mark and transferred again in the hands of Goren to some other concrete time or space, and was reborn again as a corporal substance deprived of any delusive dimension.
By combining between minimalist geometrical motives and the natural shapes and textures of the stone, Goren strives to soften the inflexible image of the Basalt, as a reversal to the classical act of the sculpture who carves/exposes the figure hidden inside the stone. In his acts of quarrying and adding Goren reproduces their pure shape, bestowing upon them life marks which give his sculptures a historical dimension. Thus he has “sawed” a bloody stitch to one rock, which seams to suture and saften its inner substance which might be pored out without it. Another rock is trapped in a red net, which seams as though it prevents her escape; and into another a white chalk powder is combined, emphasizing the primal division between black and white, the approval and disapproval receiving confirmation trough the artists’ work. Most sculptures represent some sort of polarity between the primal materials, between softness and solidity, between movement and stability.
All these actions seam to combine into “short stories”, hints of concealed narratives and a delicate symbolism developed/uncovered by the artist. It seams that Goren does not aspire for the permanent or eternal, he completely cancels the memorializing so common in the use of the Basalt, in favor of a personal expression of a pure aesthetics, private and internal.