*Due to the current security situation, exhibition dates may change.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Shlomo Alfandary’s paintings are not easily decipherable. They even mislead the “knowledgeable” viewer, who tends to define, associate, and identify influences and references. To all appearances, we are faced with a modernist painting, perhaps some echoes of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square<\/em>, or allusions to American painting \u00e0 la Frank Stella or Kenneth Noland, but in fact, it is doubtful whether these names or their work are even known to Alfandary. The series featured in this exhibition was mostly inspired by Butoh dance, which the artist has been practicing for the last decade. Butoh originated in Japan in the late 1950s with a dance theater piece by Tatsumi Hijikata, and since then has been widespread around the world in different versions and interpretations, stressing such aspects as the connection between mind and body or between emotion and movement.<\/p>\n Almost meditatively, Alfandary brings his experiences as a Butoh dancer and a painter to the canvas\u2014his thoughts, feelings, and emotions\u2014through abstract and formal painting, which only rarely contains figurative images. The color language is monochromatic for the most part, echoing the principles of the form of Butoh dance which adheres to pale, monotonous coloration, sometimes whitening the dancers’ body to blur their identity and expand their boundaries. In each painting, the artist seeks to convey his emotional state at a given time, the time of the painting; hence it can be said that in front of each blank canvas stands another Shlomo Alfandary or, as Kazuo Ohno, one of the pioneers of Butoh, put it: “The dancer you were yesterday is not the dancer you are today, nor the dancer you will be tomorrow.”<\/p>\n Some of the paintings are created with closed eyes in an attempt to simulate the moments of transition from wakefulness to sleep, moments when we surrender control over our minds and bodies. The paintings do not tell a story; they are an emotional outburst. Layers of depth are created on the canvas\u2014a circle within a circle within a circle, a square within a square within a square. Even when it seems as though a modernist grid holds the base of the painting, the edges of the grid come loose, and the infrastructure is undermined. Alfandary has a movement language of his own, which is converted into a visual language\u2014a cluster of images and painterly gestures which are infused into the canvas. The hand draws what the heart feels, like a seismograph recording earthquakes. The Japanese term “Butoh” means stamping dance; for Alfandary, the stamping elicits a mental vibration, manifested in the stroke of a brush on the canvas.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ilan Wizgan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11492,"template":"","categories":[204],"artists":[5238],"exhibition":[5239],"curator":[798],"years":[4997,5236],"class_list":["post-11375","exhibitions","type-exhibitions","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solo-exhibitions","artists-shlomo-alfandary","exhibition-loose-ends","curator-ilan-wizgan","years-2023-en","years-2024-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibitions\/11375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibitions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exhibitions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11375"},{"taxonomy":"artists","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artists?post=11375"},{"taxonomy":"exhibition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibition?post=11375"},{"taxonomy":"curator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/curator?post=11375"},{"taxonomy":"years","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/years?post=11375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}