Two Thousand and Eleven

The paintings in the exhibition Two Thousand and Eleven by Oren Eliav, winner of the Rappaport Prize for Young Israeli Painter in 2010, are a sequel to the exhibition "They Won't Wake Us Up in Time", which was presented in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2010. In both exhibitions, Eliav's works raise questions of time in two ways: by disrupting the sense of historicity and by creating a "duration" of an imagined sound. Eliav's works create an appearance of a past time, "disturbingly familiar", which is based on the cultural memory burned into the viewer's consciousness. But a prolonged observation of the paintings reveals an intermediate space, which, according to the artist, functions like "a limbo between worlds, to which normal laws of history do not actually apply." Many paintings, such as the "Listeners" portraits (2011), evoke the illusion of sound, sound waves that intensify and spread through the exhibition space. Oren Eliav's paintings deal, among other things, with disturbances of vision and the diversion of vision from its traditional functions. Eliav attaches great importance to the translation of visibility; But precisely as a means of disruption and not as a means of description. Eliav paints the things that cannot be grasped, what is absent or missing. His works move in the small space between the things themselves, where there is an elusive and disappearing truth, a truth hidden from view.