Seven Brides at the Gate

It seems that nothing really exists in Hillah Nevo’s paintings. The gaze, which wanders through the dark spaces she creates tries to hold on to a certain point, to settle on any kind of trustworthy certainty. Such attempts immediately encounter the blurred boundaries of the space’s identity – evasive, impossible, simultaneously material and spiritual. Nothing exists in the paintings, and the existence defined in them will never be within reach of becoming something. It is a haunted existence, an existence that is incessantly created and destroyed, defining its boundaries and immediately renouncing them, expanding and a moment later shrinking only to be rejected. In this existence there are no forms, only the shadows of forms. There is no space only the shadow of space, no time but the shadow of time. It is a mythical space where the light and the darkness aren’t defined by the absence of the other, but as two creating forces situated in a constant struggle with one another. A struggle that is also a merging: a yearning of the being and the non-being eternally intertwined within each other. A struggle that is also the meeting point of two “non-things” seeking to be a third “non thing”. Hillah Nevo’s painting dances on that mythical moment – it demands the gaze to give up the space, which does not exist anyway, in order to be carried away into the bottom of the chaos, the founding point of the creation.

Assi Meshullam