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Current Exhibitions - Tova Osman Art Gallery
Sometimes in the Dark
Lucy Elkivity
Tova Osman Gallery - 7/11/08 - 27/11/08
Letters of the Soul / Mordechai Geldman
At the background of Lucy Elkivity's paintings dwells the Buddhist Zen calligraphy. Her works (which are not presented in the current exhibition) include calligraphic pages with Hebrew letters at the bottom of which a sort of Haiku poem is printed. Zen calligraphy and Haiku Poems have a religious feeling about them, and are meant to bring the viewer to the experience of ultimate reality, of "suchness" - and Elkivity's calligraphic works follow the same tendency. They grant words and even letters an enhanced material presence and thus inspire contact with the sphere allegedly found beyond language. The flickering Hebrew letters in these works often remind us of the role of letters in the Kabala.
But Lucy Elkivity's works, presented in this exhibition, develop this calligraphic genre and divert it not beyond but rather "under" the letters. Her works include representations of animals, insects and birds that resemble letters but also creatures whose development is not yet complete, some of them in a process of metamorphosis. These beings and their environment always have spots and lines encoding mental commotions, seemingly not included in a recognizable identity. These show the decomposition of the representation or a state preceding its crystallization as an identifiable form, which has a name. Sometimes these metamorphosis processes create new beings, assembled from the fragments of several different representations.
Lucy Elkivity's paintings do not take us into the holy metaphysical void of the Zen paintings, but into the world of creation dwelling in our unconscious. They're showing that which repeatedly comes into being from the spirit hovering above the dark abyss. In the unconscious, representations of the self and desire are in constant formation. The "primary processes" of the unconscious select modes of representation revealing themselves in dreams., Displacement and condensation, the main mechanisms of the primary processes, utilize "ready-made" representations, but also create hybrid entities. Sometimes the unconscious fragments these representations and destroys them, but often it also uses their parts to create new creatures. Due to their tight link to the processes of the unconscious, the works of Lucy Elkivity can be described as spontaneous surrealism.
The dreamlike spirit in Lucy Elkivity's works is subject to gloom, represented by the black color she uses. But even in this gloom one finds creative flight of the mind and overt longing for the beautiful and delicate, or even the sacred. The foul blackish puddles gathered in them are balanced by clarity, striving toward names, words and letters, and also toward the purity of the white spaces. Sometimes this balance evokes recollection of Kafka's stories, and her insects look like relatives of the bug Gregor Samsa turned into. This recollection is influenced also by the illustrative element in her works. They often look like illustrating mysterious narratives, which never were and would not be written, exactly as dreams do. The dominating black in her works is not just a representation of an abysmal gloom, but also of the ink used for writing.
Lucy Elkivity's works have a rich cultural and inter-textual background. Their connection to Zen Buddhism, Kabala, Western Surrealism and Action Painting adds to their intricacy. But at the same time her paintings also possess an original quality: through them we can sense a depressive and painful personal aspect, the gentleness and delicacy originating in her femininity and even a degree of humor.
Mordechai Geldman
Tova Osman Gallery - Opening 7/11/08 - Closing 27/11/08
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