In an exhibition of ink paintings, Rachel Rabinovitch embarks on a journey into the depths of the soul.
The Dan brook and her tiny studio in Kibbutz Dafna, the geographical distance from the scene of artistic events, the smartphone, thoughts, memories and intense feelings, are the outline of Rachel Rabinovitch’s exhibition.
Huge limbs attached to a puny, pliable body, document through a smartphone the dizzying dance of a figure whirling around herself – a repeating image in the series My Travels With Smarty, where Rabinovitch started documenting her daily rites: descending to the brook, splashing, the light, water animals, the thicket, the swing and the solitude. The sacred, suffering figure grew from a tiny, ascetic format into a dazzling large scale. Either way, her absurd story is unique and daring.

Rabinovitch, free from political agenda or affiliation to a specific artistic genre, responds bravely to any phenomenon and sentiment, unhesitant to expose trouble, fear or spiritual agony. Thus, as the journey persists, the river flora and the flickering light metamorphose into millions of tiny cameras monitoring the figure fleeing with the skin-of-her-teeth to a sanctuary. The reversal, as the refuge becomes a danger-zone creates spectacular estrangement reaching a climax as the figure itself becomes an animal and blends into the menacing wilderness. According to Rabinovitch’s mythology a symbiotic bond exists between human-being and animal, thus the identity-switching figure transforms once into a caracal – a nimble, fearless desert-cat breeding mice, and then into a fish faced figurine who spitefully splashes her half-human body in the water.

Another contraption helping Rabinovitch intensify the paradox is in her choice to paint an epic fantasy with ink on paper. The liquid, evasive and uncontrollable, becomes in Rabinovitch’s skilled hands tamed, humble and precise. The ascetic, enigmatic image challenges the relaxed viewer forcing to bridge the gap between the layered narrative and the weightless near-sketchy technique. In her own words: “a balance of liquids must be preserved, because otherwise things go awry. Painting with ink, like bathing in the Dan River’s frozen waters are challenging life catalysts, relaxing adrenalin catapults enabling to switch frequency to the space between thoughts.”

* Melanopsis is a genus of freshwater snails with a gill and an operculum, aquatic gastropod mollusks in the family Melanopsidae. -Wikipedia

Closing: 03.12.16