Zeeat Zahav

Once the firmament and earth were separated, a controversy was born.* Be it political disagreement or poetic indecision, either beginning with physical division or ending with subjugation to bounds and limitations, its implicit or explicit conditioning is one and the same – a product of the life of an indigenous person against that of the Other.

Rakefet Viner-Omer says that while working on her painting Golden Sweat, she was absorbed in reading Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s novel The Bridal Canopy. The way of life and routes taken by Yudel, the novel’s protagonist, in the modular and replete with upheavals plot served her as a basis for her fragmentary sequence of events.

Nurtured by the word as well as by the image, Viner-Omer brought together a wide range of images, whose arbitrary juxtaposition might be interpreted as an uninhibited gesture rather than an orientation index or a refuge anchor – horse’s heads, skeletons, a rabbit, gold paint, a cross, tombs, disruptive scraps of texts, angels, mixed metaphors,** celestial lights, skulls, and other motifs. These motifs hover like signs around the painted abstract space that the artist has opened between her implied heavens and earth. Colorful, formal, material, and textual signs emerge in the work as a strategy that weighs the capabilities of analogies and the operation of structures, which “resemble” something rather than being the thing itself.

(Shlomit Breuer)