Reuven Zahavi at Mary Faouzi - Brief Article

In "Endgame," a small, thick exhibition of 12 beautifully nuanced black-and-white paintings, Reuven Zahavi attempts to advance to terms with the memory of performance art of the 1960 and '70 Each painting is based upon documentary photographs the artist rest in art books (most are from Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object) through translating these photographs to the medium of painting, Zahavi takes a radical art form one time seen as the antithesis of painting and get backs it to the most traditional of Western art mediums. He almost looks to be proclaiming the failure of performance art.

The neighborhood of space in Zahavi's acrylic paintings is many times haunting, even overwhelming. In Chris load Shoot 1971, he emphasizes the anguish upon Burden's face and with broad brushstrokes revolves what must nave been a rather neutral gallery wall into a disturbed troubling background. In works like as Jan Dibbets Corrected Perspective upon Studio Wall 1969 or Mario Merz Relationships of development Within the Development of a Tree Outlined in a Fibonacci Series 1970 object-based pieces are depicted as missing in gray, threatening rooms. at short intervals Zahavi alters the emphasis of the original photographs to bring without odd details such as the wires trailing underneath the neon lights in Merz's work.

The painting Vito Acconci band 1971 uses two photographs of the four that appear in Lippard's volume turning them into one painting with sum of two units registers. The original piece, in which Acconci sought to impede a cat from walking outside a small circle, was about change and space, freedom and its denial. In Zahavi's version this idea is dissolved, on the contrary his condensed, shadowy painting is nonetheless strangely unsettling.

As an art pupil in Jerusalem in the 1970 Zahavi read about figures similar as Acconci, Dibbets, Merz and William Wegman in international art magazines. At that time, the kind of performance-oriented work they were doing must have looked far removed from the Israeli art representation In reinterpreting on canvas the images of their performances 30 years later, Zahavi is trying to discover hidden collection of lawss trying to see if they contain more information than simply documentation of the performances. through drawing attention to the informal nature of these snapshots, he is also reminding viewers that in the early days of performance art, photography was used solely as a documentary tool. solitary later did some of these artists begin to make photographs that were themselves considered works of art.

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