Observations

30 Years of Observing and Painting Landscape

In this current exhibition, Michael Kovner reveals one of the most important aspects in his work – landscape painting. The body of works binds an assortment of landscape investigations that have characterized the artist since the beginning of the eighties. The views of the land, from north to south, are treated on the canvases and sketches in a way that is both loving and critical, scientific and romantic. Kovner is one of few from his generation who doesn’t turn his back on to the Israeli landscape: he sends a straight and sober gaze to it, follows its every move, exploring the roots of its creation. The Negev, the Jordan and Jezreel Valley, the Tabor, are all attached to biblical stories as well as being foundation stones of the Zionist narrative. Kovner walks through them alone, a bundle of paints and paper swung over his shoulder, trying to understand their magic and his/our belonging to them.

Kovner is an investigative painter and his landscape paintings are also “painting views” that first and foremost deal with the language of painting, its essence, history and development. As such, he is similar to Cezanne and the Impressionists, but differs from them in the viewpoint he chooses. The current exhibition accentuates Kovner’s special landscape viewpoints, his choice to stand on the side, not in the view but at a high and distant observation point, usually overlooking the landscape from above. Even so, it seems he is not trying to capture the whole or to flatten it, as if it were captured through a satellite lens. He is interested in the view seen by a bird in flight, in motion up and down, in constantly changing perspectives. The peak of this process is expressed in the desert landscape paintings that have significant importance in the exhibit. This series forms closure to the Judean desert landscape paintings, painted in the late seventies – early eighties. In those first paintings, the attempt to “capture it all” is seen, as in an aerial photograph, where the presence of the painter is almost concealed. In his later paintings, the gaze is mature, contemplative; the immediate, sensual and spiritual connection with the view as well as the acceptance of human limitations is evident.
The exhibition ends (or opens with a more intimate space containing sketches on paper. This space seeks to activate the viewer in a way different than the large ones: instead of a distant gaze, trying to perceive the view painted on the large canvases as a whole – a close gaze trying to track down the details; instead of an emotional-spiritual involvement trying to decipher the artist’s mood and interpretation of the view – an investigative gaze following the primary and intuitive line, etching the eye’s impression. Indeed, these sketches are the first step in the art of painting. They were created facing the view, in “field conditions” and with little means, the hand following the eye’s movement throughout the view. Only later, the sketches are brought to the artist’s studio where they become the base and starting point for the large canvas paintings. They are, as such, the outcome of the studio’s “deciphering”, a process in which the sketches replace the actual landscape as the object of painting, freeing the artist from the obligation to the “landscape’s truth” and allowing a new work of art to be created from the inner truth.