In the framework of the cultural program “Italy, Cultures, the Mediterranean” promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, two individual exhibitions curated by Daniela Talmor and Ermanno Tedeschi.
The Chagall House in Haifa hosts two exhibitions in the framework of the cultural program “Italy, Cultures, the Mediterranean” promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
Barbara Nejrotti from Torino (Italia) and Hava Gilon from Haifa (Israele), together with the aim of creating intercultural dialogue.
Hava Gillon explores the limits of drawing as a medium of art. In the series ‘Drawn in Wood’ she goes beyond the encounter between drawing and paper, to experiment with drawing on old, castaway wooden panels. She first draws a photographic image on a large sheet of paper, and then transfers the image onto a wooden panel made up of second-hand plywood sheets, joined together. The choice of working on old sheets, found locally, is not to be grasped as a gesture to the movement “Want of Matter” which dominated the Israeli Art Scene in the ’70s. On the contrary, the old, found plywood sheets used as the work bases contain a warm and seductive quality. Gillon’s process of work on these bases encapsulates a great deal of ambivalence. On the one hand she is drawing on old, castaway plywood sheets having different shapes, accidentally found, and on the other hand she organises these in a joinery workshop, using an industrial process, and shapes them in a specifically chosen format. Juxtaposed with these old plywood sheets, rooted in another time, their origins and past history unknown, is the very contemporary element of photography.
The process she undergoes in the work is evident in the final product, which reveals the many dilemmas she encounters. In the first phase she strives for a maximally realistic representation of the drawn object. Only later, when she begins to work on the patched-up plywood sheets, does a conflictual dialogue develop between the ambition to represent a realistic image and the changes that the wooden substratum dictates. The emergent result of this dialogue differs in each work. At times the image virtually disappears within the material, at times it remains on the surface of the wood, without penetrating it at all.
The drawings on very large plywood sheets fill the whole area of the exhibition, creating a space that is itself transformed into an art installation, inviting the spectator to be enveloped by it. The works exhibited create a special atmosphere, balanced between realism and abstraction, and between real images and their wooden substratum. On the one hand they document a visible reality. On the other they express the feelings that the depicted figures arouse. A metaphysical foundation is moulded as lines and shapes are extracted from their naturalistic contexts and shifted to a new artistic reality, perhaps more ideational. The element of mystery stands as a division between the artwork and the spectator, who desires to achieve a realistic understanding, while the artist injects into the figures new articulations.
Between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ towards art, by Barbara Nejrotti: This project was born in 2014 with the deep desire to arrive and lead to an inner conversation, to a deep correlation between the souls, to a reassuring and conscious philosophy of life, with the commitment to transform emotions and states of mind into artworks, savoring the extension of the subjects in the observer. With the development of two sewing techniques invented by the artist, studied, elaborated and still evolving through processing, the works are born and take shape trying to return in an essential way, with synthesis and balance, a value, an idea, an emotion. The chosen subjects are recurrent and inexhaustible because they are part of the human being and of his life path. To this day, this path consists of six principal themes: “In the waves”, “Hang in the balance”, “Footsteps”, “Puzzle”, “Human Being”, “Roots”. There is a feeling that resounds in each of us: balance, breathlessness of life, swirls, decompositions and compositions to become, to improve. Footprints, past and future passages, traces. Using the monochromatic aesthetics of rigorism and the balance of forms, the observer finds himself immersed in the silence that descends on the threshold between his own light and his own shadow. A return to the figurative characterizes this project, as immediacy and essentiality, which make the image understandable on several levels. The artist willingly wants to be able to touch the heart strings of a universal feeling, in a historical moment where knowing the outside becomes faster and simpler day after day and losing the sense and the dimension of ourselves is the greatest danger. The industrialization has transformed the plain color from exceptional event to everyday fact, precisely for this Barbara Nejrotti entrusts his paintings, made with one of the most ancient and symbolic arts of history, to the taste of modern graphics, accurately marking the context and the era of his works where the human being emerges and tries to get out of it with its thickness.
“Italy, Cultures, the Mediterranean” is a cultural program, which the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation will implement in the Middle East and North Africa during the year 2018, with the purpose of consolidating the dialogue between the two sides of the Mediterranean Sea. A dialogue based on the exchange and enhancement of different cultural and social identities and the combination of tradition, innovation and creativity.
* Tuesday, March 27th, 2018, at 19:00 – Vernissage & festive refreshment
* Mon-Thurs from 10:00 to 16:00
* Friday and Saturday 10:00 to 13:00, Closed Sundays.
Chagall House, 24 HaZionut Ave – Haifa
FREE ADMISSION