In painting, sculpture and installation, artists Lily Poran and Hagai Argov aim to formulate their primal – initial voice.

The duo exhibition of artists Argov – Poran is the product of an identical process of pursuit but its outcome defines the two poles of artistic expression – the parsimonious and the distilled vs. the concentrated and abundant.
Poran’s work places a female image at its center. This image represents the multiple facets of the artist as woman, painter, solitary, introverted, tough, terrified, fragile, believer, strong, bounded to the ground and floating in childhood dreams. Poran takes control over the dissonance of contradiction by fusing them together. Every element in the form of a string, photo, shred of leather, brush, embroidery or shell forms a layer in the formation of the personage, thus she manages to create a powerful whole filled with details defining her being.

Poran treats every work as distinct from the other, lonely in its expression, containing the moment, mood, location and time of its formation, while Argov expresses himself in series. His series “LyingHead” presented in the exhibition is the climax of a multi-year process during which he has been examining the connection between image and background. The image Argov examines the most is his self-portrait. Here, he totally neutralizes the background, lying his head on top of poor substances such as wooden shards and recycled planks. In this form the image becomes pure and distilled, lacking the context of time, place, disposition and consciousness, and takes on the role of a metaphor on existence. It resembles any person, in any reality at any time. Its display evokes in the spectator the need to assign to it significance on life and being.

In their endeavor to define their human essence, Argov and Poran reach an almost identical solution – tiny human figurines that look as if found in archeological digs of various cultures. Worshiping one sanctifies the human marvel while the other glorifies the abstract.