Ritual

In Elad Amsalem’s solo exhibition, Ritual, symbols, actions, and events transform the space into a liminal zone between the mundane, the ceremonial, and the artistic, inviting a reconsideration of one’s relationship with art, and of the values of beauty and illusion. Amsalem challenges boundaries, inquiring where the work of art takes place.

The exhibition consists of a series of repeated actions within a meaning-laden painterly space, enabling a transition from the everyday to other states of consciousness. It transpires on three levels: the act of painting as repeated application and erasure; the ritual spaces inhabited by the figures, which are set apart from routine life; and the exhibition space, where the encounter with the audience may produce a shift and suggest a fresh way of seeing. The distinction between these levels draws the viewer back to the primary ritual—the act of painting.

Amsalem’s ritual practice is rooted in primitivism and de-skilling: drawing away from the figure of the artist as a virtuoso master, and replacing the ideal of “good work” with simple, unraveled, symbolic gestures. Painting does not aspire to technical quality, perspective, or illusion, but to a moment of freedom that emerges within the ritual of painting.

When consciousness strips itself of the “correct” principles of painting, another type of beauty reveals itself. Amsalem likens such painting to flamenco: an intuitive entanglement of gestures, which gives rise to a simple, precise solution. The moment of grace is the moment of disentangling, without perfection and without a consensual ideal of beauty.

The paintings carry a sense of the outdoors and of open space, alongside a rawness that emphasizes painting as a material object, rather than a mere image. The ceramics and frayed edges function like “grounding wires,” expanding the painting and linking the two-dimensional with the three-dimensional, and the depicted world with the viewing space. Along the axis between figurative and abstract, the question arises: what is “primitive” here—the freedom from the image, or rather the figures themselves? Perhaps their function is to bind the corporeal world to the painting. Rather than creating a seductive illusion, the painting exposes its underlying seams. Thus, the shift proposed by the exhibition takes us back to the starting point, to the act of painting itself as a ritual; not a mechanism of control and perfection, but a space in which unraveling, inquiry, and reinvention of the seemingly self-evident become possible.

Hadas Glazer

Events in the exhibition:

• Saturday 18.3 at 12pm | Gallery talk with Elad Amsalem & Hadas Glazer
• Wednesday 15.4 at 5pm | Gallery talk with Elad Amsalem & Hadas Glazer