A thick light blue stands in the leaves of the poplar
And a large light rests on the stake supporting the roses.
Two pepper trees are entangled and branched within one another
At my age, tender when I was born, in my honor,
Wrapped in sprayed softness. Like their inflorescence
Drifts the dark gold of bees, flickering intermittently,
Leaving and rising, coming from out of the ornaments
The hum of its murmuring ripening early, full with feeling
Trembling and setting, moving to float in the face,
Diffusing a cleansing love of some sort.1
Yona Wolloch
Floating, trembling, setting on thick, light blue water, an image oozing a diluted red smudge. The image’s hands are spread out in devotion opposite a white, transparent pool into which white flowers have been thrown, as though in some mystic pagan ritual, as though a great light has been revealed to it. The texture of the bed of the tree spills out in waves all around, like a sketch of sorts on the surface. The topography of an expanse that is personal and utopian; an observation from without the body. The view is reflected via a vantage point from above, by means of foreshortening, and the viewers, as a result, are left distant and detached. They are not partners to the event they are observing. It takes place in a different expanse of time and consciousness, some personal place, like a hallucination or dream.
In a different image of floating, the artist permits us a bit of closeness. A photograph of her head, torn and mangled, dispatches a look at the viewers, as it floats on a bed of plywood the texture of lucid waves. Detached elements torn off from the self are a recurrent motif in Orit Goldman’s works, as though she wants to penetrate both physically and mentally, into the expanses of her head and belly. Despite the portrait’s being torn, the protruding red lips smile as though they were Orpheus’ lips floating on the river surface after he had been torn to pieces by the women that idolized the god Dionysus. Orpheus continues to sing his love song to Eurydice, who remains in the netherworld, diffusing cleansing love. The brain’s cortex opens, but the head, fissured and ornamented by a regal wreath of squill flowers, does not bleed. It continues to drift,to rage, to generate gleaming waves, ripples that are both creativity and passion.
Painter Orit Goldman is inundated with lust and creates from within a tempest. As a child she spent many hours by the sea, throwing stones into the water and observing the concentric circles they made, which floated until they waned.There was much enchantment in these water circles; the one closest to us is the farthest from the center from which it was created. Sometimes, what is distant from us is that which is much closer. She also flung herself into the sea, saturated in flotation, both physical and spiritual. Floating, a unique feeling of what is an active and passive condition at the same time; floating, as a meditative act that is almost a ritual.
“Oh sea. Sky. Wrap me in mist.” 2
Floating that is pleasant and liberating. Not necessarily suffering. And perhaps it is the buoyancy that follows pain. Ataraxia. Floating, after the blending of spirit and self. Internal connection. A fan of feelings and transient thoughts that are spread out and opened, to generate a process of flooding the mind of filth. Goldman does not work with acceleration dryers. The material, the spirit, the process need to be respected, the time required for everything to be united. It’s not necessary for anything to be rushed. Purging will come after the mental filth has been flooded, purification that may or may not be the peak. Not catharsis in the traditional sense of the word, but purification that is the result of cleanliness and the removal of filth, not necessarily in that order.The filth floats, rising atop the water, sinks, and floats up again. The water appears to be clean and clear, but suddenly it becomes murky again – like the dynamics of life.
What is pure becomes dirty and cleansed, alternatively. Line, smudge, pieces of a collage. The rays of the moon clean Chanele’s Sabbath dress and it, as expected, will get dirty again and the stains will float on the whiteness… real-time catharsis, a Sisyphean circularity.
As a painter with experience in a wide variety of techniques Goldman decided on plywood as the basis for her works. The planks are heavy – 12 mm – and she really adores them.“Plywood is my epidermis,” Goldman, the artist, states. The unrefined texture remains naked, honored by being exposed, enjoying the erasures. The skin is apparent to all. The artist developed a layer of interior skin in the course of her life. The painting’s epidermis, the plywood, is a material that is adsorbent and absorbent at the same time, unique in this respect and different from the other materials on which an artist can draw. It becomes saturated metaphorically too, saturated with ideas and world viewes. Women also absorb. Internalize. Forgive. Originally, they were gleaners. Leaks and stains on layers and circles still exist as remnants of an immense journey of color that she has cast on plywood. Arte Povera comes to mind in this respect, however, as opposed to the paucity of material in minimalistic art, Goldman does not skimp on color or feeling, which is absorbed and leaves signs on epidermis belonging to someone else, penetrating beneath this other’s epidermis at times and sticking there. The stomach area is particularly sensitive in this regard. Large quantities of feelings have stuck here, generating storms. She pours copious quantities of glue on the plywood, glue that exudes from the tempests in her stomach. Remnants of sorts. Quite often, a puddle of blood reappears, however, for Goldman, red does not symbolize anger. It is blood caused by ripping, as part of the process of purification. Secretions are something positive; not filth, not necessarily degradation,but what remains after purging, and what is collected on its way to her. The real truth.
According to Julia Kristeva, mire, detritus and whatever else that is impure, are distanced from us in order to enable life to go on. 3 Goldman is enthralled by the struggle between good and evil, the combination of the aesthetic and the disgusting. A floating figure in one of her works spreads out its hands towards a sea of blood, leaks of red color atop a white stain. An immense whiteness is located behind the figure, purity and abjection at the same time. Beauty and ugliness, as though she is stopping the well springs of pain.
“Place a large dam
By the wellsprings of pain
Hoard with it
As though water
Protect it
That it won’t scatter
Since it is your life.”4
The path to purification is fraught with bloodshed. Ritual and sacrifice. “What is contemptible? Whatever garbles identity, a system, order. Whatever does not respect boundaries, places, rules.”5 Searching for boundaries is a concern for Goldman in her works, which she sees as a platform for what is deformed, distorted and twisted. She tests the extremes: the photograph of her face attempts to surge from the plywood’s epidermis; pink cotton candy bursts forth from the torn brain like a whirlwind or a tornado. The human body is fragile indeed, saturated with abjection. Blood floats everywhere, pools of blood, a bleeding pharynx, lips red as though sewn into the epidermis, as though permission to speak were snatched away. Freedom of expression is not self-evident, which is why she has created original, plastic methods of expression. Freedom and creativity are embodied for her in the figure of Artemisia Gentileschi. The red lips have been treated with a particular type of acrylic that is carcinogenic. It isn’t sold anymore, but searched for this shade and would not give up, until she located it. She goes with her art to the precipice and does not compromise. Yona Wolloch.
“And I will exaggerate only colors without any colors,
Where are the abstract colors
As symbols of lights and colors
And God And I We too
are abstract then, but the eyes the eyes
When the eyes see, then we are almost abstract.” 6
The photograph of Goldman’s face is practically abstract. The face floats, drifting inside a boat leaking black paint, drifting in the wide open spaces of an internal world. An anigozanthos flower decorates an eyelid, a type of natural make-up, an interesting confluence of photo, pencil, diluted color, a twisted, delicate, barely touching line. Egon Schiele. “A spark from his soul came to me to protect me,” she declares, speaking of her mystic connection with Schiele. In fact, something of the wildness or primordial nature characteristic of the works of the early-20th-century Austrian artist is rooted in Goldman’s brush strokes and pencil lines. Something savage in the cutting up of the body. The isolation of the raging head. She believes that everyone is born with a small flame. Chaim Kiewe was her teacher; he loved the wildness, loved the flame. All through her childhood she tried to keep the flame from being extinguished. Perhaps that is why her eyes penetrate from beneath the plywood’s epidermis. She says that she listens with her eyes. The eyes see and we become nearly abstract. Ghosts with an epidermis. Abstraction, an immensely expressive artistic tool in Goldman’s works: pools of blood; the flooding of light blue murky water. Nevertheless, there is no compromising the language of perspective and foreshortening. It is a discipline of floating images that couldn’t float, so it seems, were their hands not stretched out and foreshortened in the right way. An artistic statement. She learns from the tradition of painting, while in rebellion from it at the same time. She sketches, but works with a pencil as though it were a lance, piercing the sketch, sometimes rocking it. She thrusts her hands into gallons of paint, aided by a particular type of vandalism, and she enjoys it. Sometimes it’s a clean acrylic pigment, industrial emulsions at other times, soft lead pencils, layers of graphite. She has more regular brushes than paintbrushes. She crumples paper, and the wrinkles are like life itself. She learns the rules in order to know them, but works with paints and materials as she pleases. A wild flower. The the opposite side, in order to create a lightbox, take the place of the second eye. A splotch of illumination floats behind, shining its light through the holes. A miniature planetarium. Floating is flowering, hallucination, purification, an immense light.
Dr. NavaSevilla Sadeh squill, a rare flower, Short-lived and individualistic, appears in her work in various forms:sometimes as a wreath reminiscent of the innocence of youth; floating on the epidermis at other times. The squill appears flowering and falling in one of her works, with one eye only, ripped out, above a pool of blood, observing from the side. Four-hundred holes drilled laboriously on
Mixed media, acrylic, industrial emulsions, soft pencils, graphite,
oily chalks, parts of collages
on raw plywood
123X150 cm
Footnotes
1YonaWolloch, The Subconscious Unfolds Like a Fan – Selection of Poems: 1963-1985, editor of a selection of poems by YonaWolloch: HilitYeshurun. Tel Aviv, HakibbutzHa’Meuchad. 1992, P. 49. (English translation of poems: Dr. Gerry Aronow).
2Wolloch, The Subconscious Unfolds Like a Fan, “Oh, Sea, Sky, p. 48.3Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. From the Hebrew translation, Tel Aviv, Resling, 2005, p. 9.
4Wolloch, The Subconscious Unfolds Like a Fan, p. 302.
5Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. From the Hebrew translation, Tel Aviv, Resling, 2005, p. 9.
6Wolloch, The Subconscious Unfolds Like a Fan, p. 106.
4Wolloch, The Subconscious Unfolds Like a Fan, p. 302.
5Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. From the Hebrew translation, Tel Aviv, Resling, 2005, p. 9.
6Wolloch, The Subconscious Unfolds Like a Fan, p. 106.
4Wolloch, The Subconscious Unfolds Like a Fan, p. 302.
5Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. From the Hebrew translation, Tel Aviv, Resling, 2005, p. 9.
6Wolloch, The Subconscious Unfolds Like a Fan, p. 106.
curator Dr Nava Sevilia Sade translation Jerry Aharonov