וגם לינק לקריאה מקוונת- http://www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/art/newexhibitions/.premium-1.2230140
Eitan
buganim, Grey Sun
Originally
published in Galleria
Magazine, Ha'aretz,
30.1.2014
In
her new solo show that opens today, Aline Alagem asks to expose what
is hidden behind the mechanisms of passion and beauty
Summits
of bliss, beauty, passion and ecstasy, stand at the core of Aline
Alagem's new solo show, that opens today at Artstation gallery Tel
Aviv. Icebergs, engineered women, cloned wild horses, pornographic
scenes and luxury symbols are part of the hyper realist imagery of
Alagem that appears in six
new paintings on show. Alagem chose the images, plastered to the
canvas as emptied peaks of inferior pictures, popular folklore of the
spectacle culture, collapsing -into themselves- hyper realist
compositions, in order to expose the mechanisms of passion and beauty
that create heights of perfection in every moment, a promised
catharsis that is never reached. The power that the image sustains,
given to it so that it can ground our abstract existence, has grown
into a monster to which we are enslaved. And still, says Alagem, “the
passion itself for the image, even while walking astray in a dark
corridor, is still authentic and I still insist on portraying it”.
The passion and its lack of
satisfaction is manifested for example in a painting where a
porn scene meets an exotic bird- in a formation of a stir beneath the
surface, beyond the congestion and lack of hierarchy, “In an
impossible experience that cannot offer relief. But this is also the
generator of painting, the
search for relief, by duplicating the peaks”, she explains.
Next
to the six paintings in the show there is also a new video work, for
the first time in the painter's career. In this animation work, the
artists eyes are drawn, opening and closing, with a snowy landscape
that appears alternately as in a dream or a journey. Once the travel
experience becomes concrete and identified, as we deepen into the
landscape, it start to fade. Alagem sees in this video work, “in
the pain beneath the plastic and in the sisypheanism of the
landscape's frames, that charge the glowing images with the attempt
to find rescue from themselves” a personal, intimate, vulnerable
act.
The
paintings, however, are distant for their intensity creates an
eliminated relationship between the artist and the viewers. “I'm
less meaningful here, the image is the protagonist”, she says, “and
that's also my conflict- where do I find myself in this duality where
I'm as in love with the image as I am aware of being lied to.
Embracing this fascination next to my reluctance,
is a situation that is as confusing to me as it is for the viewer”.
In order to talk about the monstrous power of the hyper image, Alagem
asks to give it the presence it has in the real world, even thought
she has almost disappeared from the equation. Almost, because despite
the fact her painting is conscious of its surface, it still pursuits
the translation of form and sensation. In one of the paintings, for
example, appears an iceberg that has left the shore, “that says
something about the way I feel that passion, romance and
consciousness have broke away from shore. This is a pungent feeling
of detachment,” she clarifies.
The
show has no title, neither do the works, there's no text appearing in
it. The relative detachment to the universal is also manifested in
Alagem's bleak dreams about the foreign as a universal thing, as
constituting the peripheral. “I’m also talking about the desire
to marvel at the here, from something you meet on you way home
against the sun, but there is something in the here and now that is
much too gray”, she explains.
Through
the images she longs for and consumes, the artist looks for self
definition and becoming one with
it, “but you can't be an image, and this distance is the
difficulty, it's the iceberg that has left the shore, the dream about
the other place. So maybe if I keep painting it again and again it
will eventually be mine.
אין תגובות:
הוסף רשומת תגובה