Maya Gallery, TLV 2021

Curator: Ilan Wizgan

 

A tower, a flag, a ladder, a crescent moon, the roaring lion from Tel Hai - these and other images/symbols inhabit the body of work displayed in Doron Fishbein's new solo exhibition at the gallery. The images are usually set against a blue background, sometimes brown, a background that is both full and empty at the same time. The compositions are minimalist, and the general atmosphere is nocturnal, melancholic, romanticist. The familiar images are seemingly detached from a context, drawn in a thin, graphic and geometric way, seeking to be deciphered. A long observation - and these simple-looking paintings do require such observation - slowly unveils the mystery surrounding the works. Here are a wall and a tower. Here is the well in dispute. Here are the control and monitoring devices on the mountain peaks, the guard towers, the tunnels. Here is a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven ... but angels are not ascending or descending on it. The complexity of the Israeli reality of life, as experienced by Fishbein, seems to emerge from the images, out of darkness. Israeli national symbols and myths of heroism are confronted with kites and balloons (incendiary kites and balloons?), with Muslim symbolism, with an archetype of a house, which may be Israeli or Palestinian, with a sabra bush which is also disputed and appropriated by the two peoples inhabiting this small plot of God. The moon in its iconic form is the protagonist of this body of works, as expected in a series of works lacking daylight. Along with other archetypal images, such as stairs, wells, ladders and more, they are reminiscent of the "blue works" of Juan Miró from the 1920s and 1930s, in which we also find similar images, as well as a similar visual confrontation of geometric and amorphous shapes. But the resemblance is merely formal, unconscious, as this is the archetypes’ way to cross cultures and move through time and space. Miro's abstract paintings were inspired by the Dada movement and created under the surrealist influence of his time, while Fishbein's paintings are concrete and fundamental, hinting at the here and now. The ensemble is filled with quiet tension, looks like a score or outline for an acrobatics show or a theatre of absurd, in which we are, perhaps, the actors or the puppets. Visible or hidden hands activate the show, pulling strings, performing stunts - control actions in the guise of a circus or childhood games. The almost sole character present in some of the works seems to have lost grip on the ground and hovers between heaven and earth, flying or diving in an impressive aerial display; a kind of Artemis, the mythical moon goddess, performing a show to the sounds of a moonlight sonata of her own. Does Doron Fishbein present us with formalist or symbolic painting, an allegory for our situation? This is where we, the viewers, come into the picture.