Shirley Egozi | Ester Aruti | Dan Birenboim | Grisha Bluger | Tzvi Ben Aretz | Michal Ben-Zeev | Chanchal Banga | Orna Bromberg | Roy Givati | Hadar Gad | Tsuki Garbian | Adva Drori | Yvonne Helmrich | David Tartakover | Amnon Yuhas | Nurit Yarden | Zohar Cohen | Michal Lewit | Shlomi Lellouche | Mnoukhine | Ruth Norman | Miri Nishri | Nimrod Buller Rosenthal Nishri | Tami Suez | Shy Abady | Paula Elion | Rinat Reisner Podissuk | Dalit Proter | Rachel Rabinovitch | Dan Reisner | Ohad Shaaltiel | Hanan Shlonsky

“Araf Fun Punim”, the Yiddish expression describes someone whose face is fallen and is in dire straits, was translated into Hebrew to- “Al Hapanim”. The exhibition, which was conceived as a protest against the social/political condition, changed its purpose as artists invited to participate, chose portraits to reflect insights, not just into the personalities of the painted, photographed or sculpted subjects, but became a mirror of the times: the extremism and fervor, fear and distress, exhaustion and indolence, suffocation and despair, selfishness and herd-mentality as well as the Me and the Other and the overwhelming yearning for silence. The faces in this exhibition materialize this expression.

The half-closed eyes peeking through David Tartakover’s masking-tape mummified auto-portrait, the gas mask covering Chanchal Banga’s fragile animals and the fist in the face of the kneeling camel in Nimrod Nishri’s work, fiercely convey the sensation of suffocation. The massive craving for oxygen is evident in Tami Suez’s disturbing photo featuring a yellowish old timer seating in glorious solitude in a café. A cacophonic collage of faces in Mnoukhine’s statue, Grisha Bluger’s painting, and Tzvi Ben Aretz’ work, portray destruction and devastation. That same devastation is present in Hanan Shlonsky and Zohar Cohen’s rebellion against digital cameras: the lines, the marks and high density dots, establish a perfect sharp image, dispersing and scattering in the paintings until the images almost evaporate in the background. Surprisingly, the most extreme and grotesque distortion of the human face is found in intimate self-portraits by Michal Ben-Zeev bending, Shlomi Lellouche the clown and Rachel Rabinovitch in her hallucinatory exhibitionistic voyages with the camera.

Throughout the history of art, artists have tried to capture the muse and express some amazement of the world, through self-portraits. In this exhibition it seems that use of the mirror to reach the depths of the soul is the predominant motivation for the self-portraits: thus revealed are Shirley Egozi in her sadness, Yvonne Helmrich with her fever and Dan Reisner wrestling with himself. A gloomy breathtaking world is reflected in Amnon Yuhas’ self-portrait and Ohad Shaaltiel’s black fireworks in the background complementing his gloomy expression.

Aiming to describe the void and blindness, Shy Abady appropriates the handsome character carrying Jesus on his shoulders in great grief and suffering from Pontormo’s (Jacopo Carruchi 1494-1557) Deposition from the Cross, drawing a huge, radiant figure in bright colors yet hollow-eyed and blind. In 1621 Marie de’ Medici (wife of Henry the 4th) commissioned a cycle of 24 paintings from Rubens in order to remedy her shaky moral image. Tsuki Garbian takes the liberty to appropriate one of Rubens’ (Peter Paul 1577-1640) paintings and totally disfigures her as a rebellious act in the face of rulership. Inspired by church iconography, Orna Bromberg chooses to taper her “Red Queen Esthers” into an oblong format, converting them into narrow ascetic icons of femininity.

Ruth Norman’s 20’s family portrait featuring four severe, tight-lipped women is an honest, nostalgic response to modern family portraits, stuffed with hypercritic smiles. Rinat Podissuk-Reisner uses Jackie Kennedy’s portrait as an icon of rich, pearl adorned, bourgeoisie seated at an impeccably set table with brilliant ring, lacking facial features or personality. Michal Levitte draws a girl seated by the window looking out. Her relaxed posture reveals tension and detachment: her body and head face the room and her gaze wonders apathetically outside. In a powerful painting Paula Elion draws a father flogging his daughter. The act is reflected in their expressions: the fury, the abuse, the violence and the pain. Dan Birenboim draws a human convoy marching into the horizon. In the front of the frame, his back turned at the spectator, walks an armed cocked soldier. Whether guarding the convoy or part of it, his ambiguous posture, is saddening. Hadar Gad displays the paradox inherent in the male image, drawing three half-naked men in a public-bath with Hai chains hanging from their necks onto their chubby, soft, exposed bellies. By contrast, Ester Aruti describes the fragility of relations of two women in Muslim society, one modern the other traditional, in vivid colors and touching posture.

A boy in red boxer pants, delicate body, exposes a round belly and bulging ribs, a coif covering his head and a feminine chain on his neck, fierce gaze, saluting at the spectator. Thus Dalit Proter characterizes the image of the modern boy confused, torn between machoism and society norms expecting boys to exhibit feminine sensitivity. Nurit Yarden, in a stirring photograph featuring an innocent girl, wearing a blond wig a-la Marilyn Monroe, addresses the accelerated childhood in the 21st century. Miri Nishri, in an edited photograph, turns a girl’s shadow into the outline of a country as well as a casualty of war. Adva Drori pierces a doll in a painful ritualistic act, thus reaching the apex of childish sacrifice. In his fierce desire for silence, Roy Givati captures human-female beauty in a drop of ivory. The portrait, hidden, mysterious, is only visible from a certain angle, marking the evasiveness of the moment of grace.

Confession: as the curator of this exhibition, which lasted many months and underwent great turbulences, I realized that art is not a weapon but rather a reflection* of every artist’s sensitivity, courage, anxiety and hope.

*”In mathematics, a reflection is a mapping from a Euclidean space to itself that is an isometry with a hyperplane as a set of fixed points; this set is called the axis or plane of reflection. The image of a figure by a reflection is its mirror image in the axis or plane of reflection. For example the mirror image of the small Latin letter p for a reflection with respect to a vertical axis would look like q. A reflection is an involution: when applied twice in succession, every point returns to its original location, and every geometrical object is restored to its original state.” –Wikipedia.

Curator: Hana Coman
Closing: 24.10.15