Silent Storm / Ethel Pisareff

Curator: Hadas Glazer

Opening: Thursday 1/9/22 at 19:00

Gallery talk at Benyamini center: Friday, 23.9.22 at 11:30

An online Gallery talk: Wednesday, 26.10.22 at 19:30- Registration

Closing: Saturday, 29/10/22 at 14:00

In the exhibition Ethel Pisareff sculpts landscapes of consciousness. There are two bodies of works: scarred boats and abstract stone-like objects. The boats and the stones do not represent themselves but are metaphors of the process of becoming through which an internal conscious, illusive, unstable language is expressed.  Pisareff evades the narrative and uses the images as tools that hold the energetic essence of the creative material, and the physical appearance is the endpoint of the deeper spiritual essence.

And yet in the exhibition there are traces of the narrative, which facilitates stitching a story around the objects.  In the entrance to the gallery is a temporary structure, a quay, that cuts the gallery along the length on which the boats rest – scratched and harmed but nevertheless upright and strong.  This is an expression of a personal and collective mental state.  Beyond the “quay” are the abstract monoliths, grey and stone-like, turning one’s gaze to silent moments and to slow processes of change that are almost unnoticed.  The silence of the stones is not an absolute silence, but a pulsating silence of life.

In Silent Storm there is a strained opposing dialog alongside acceptance.  How can we understand the courage of a boat that survives the storm without the eternal stone next to it?  How can we understand the silent stone without the boat sailing alongside?  To gain this understanding we use the material, the mass, the colors in the space that create a composition of movement and flow next to calm silence, breath next beat, demanding a look beyond the outer shell, a meditative look outward and then back inward.