Feelings of Descent

Feelings of Descent /Tsibi Geva

A world of wandering, immigration, displacement; this is the world that stems out of Aya Eliav’s drawings in “Feelings of Descent”. The works’ facade, discovering itself to the eyes of the beholder, is as if growing from within and underneath the hidden layers of color, offering a sense of materialism that holds a secret. In the early paintings, the airplane appears, gently sketched, centralized; positioned at someplace, on the earth’s ground or at the ground of the painting or at the blue skies. Afterwards it will be the ship’s bow that will emerge out of the murkiness of the painting; tall masts, a massive heavy chunk of blackness. Images of movement, of wanderings, of transitions, appear and reappear as a confirmatory sign of mandatory presence, telling of life in the here and there, telling of evolutions, of a ground that is always in-between. A place that is no-place.

The appreciation and understanding of Aya’s work as landscape paintings, does not exclude the abstract image that offers itself on first sight. Vertical and horizontal plates of color, supposedly disconnected and destination-less, are placed as layered patches. Unexpectedly and inexplicably the picture is formed by, and in relation to, these abstract patches of color, in a way that grants them the meaning of a background, or interim spaces, or a detached pictographic event whose connection to its above representation is fortuitous, provisional, unstable. The way in which an entire body of work is composed out of supposedly contradictory courses of action, dissimilar in their internal logic, that abruptly meet somewhere, converse, and create a fascinating moment of pictorial grace – is captivating.In the more recent landscape paintings, arrangements and drawing grounds, meeting in a diptych manner, create a panorama, a flow, albeit fragmented, a displacement within the linearity of the horizon, of the landscape occurrence. A drawing, similar to a stalactite of ice, is a movement that froze, a paint that has congealed upon the flow of the thought, a sporadic tremor, a spontaneous gesture, a random leak of material, that similar to a puddle, is searching for its place and crystallizes into a testimony, a time ring.Aya Eliav’s paintings are clotted testimonies to this journey of the world, or to the internal voyage, searching for an illustrative phrasing to this movement.