See the Line You and Time Make Together

See and know that your co-working with time gives

your art life in time.

See the line you and time make together.

– Pesach Slabosky, The Reconditioned Inspiration (1989)

Adi Argov’s solo exhibition unveils a five-year visual study, delving into the affinities between drawing, writing, and encoding. The human body serves as a point of departure for a ramified dance of spirit and matter. As an archive of experiences and memories, it acts as a compass, guiding her creative journey, while time etches new patterns and sculpts the landscapes of her consciousness.

Between quivering lines and bare skeletons, the drawings function as an atlas of the human soul. Argov gathers acts containing elements from dance notations, musical scores, and choreographic sketches, which together become drawing tools, accumulating on the paper. The image of the skeleton is detached from its elemental anatomical function and transforms into a metaphorical bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds. Argov does not settle for the realm of the real. She sails beyond the visible, to the psychic, intellectual, and social body—those invisible “bodies” that make up our reality. The drawing layers become a transparent mesh, and details are gradually revealed, generating a tangled-rhizomatic density.

Paul Klee observed that the work of art is an organization of differences, forming a unity: the analytical viewpoint, which deconstructs the whole into its components, is just as necessary as the unifying synthetic viewpoint. In other words, the work of art, like life itself, is not a static product, but a living, breathing, and evolving organism. The artist thus oscillates between two views: the synthetic, which regards the whole as a single entity, and the analytic, which breaks down reality into atoms of meaning. Klee believed in practice and methodology, but also maintained that art practice is dynamic and continuous, and occurs when a complication arises, challenging us to distinguish between remembering the visible and revealing the invisible.

Argov is concerned not with “what” but with “how” to paint: she is immersed in the act of creation itself. Drawing becomes a meditation, in which every hand gesture articulates an inner movement, a desire for the hidden. Every line is an echo of breathing, every form is a crystallizing thought, an attempt to grasp the rational while yielding to the spiritual. The moment of separation is also a moment of reconnection, an endless cycle of transcendence and return, expansion and convergence. In a period when we are often required to “remember to breathe,” Argov reminds us of the profound complexity inherent in this basic act.

Hadassa Cohen

Special thanks to Naomi Brickman for permission to quote from Pesach Slabosky’s book. The discussion of Klee is based on his notebooks collected in The Thinking Eye (1961).