Osnat Ben Dov | New Works

Curator: Yoav Ben Dov
Exhibition Opening: Thursday, 29.9.2016 at 8 pm
Gallery talk with Jan Rauchwarger the the curator will take place 7.10.2016 at 12 noon

The Edge of Night | Osnat Ben Dov

By: Nir Harmat                             

Osnat Ben Dov's works seek to expand the physical and mythical aspects of her photographed objects.

She contextualizes with Art History, confronts the ephemeral representation with the eternal, the existing with the inherently ending. She asks to pierce the reality and touch the thing itself, as well as the viewer of her works.

The compositions in the exhibition are direct and subtle, revealing the fundamental beauty of the object and the relationships between a familiar formalistic approach  and its soft drawing in light.  The quotidian becomes sublime, the mundane emerges as spiritual.

Ben Dov uses silence and time as a material quality. She shoots in natural northern light, at dawn. Her lens reveals the light's pat on the objects, at the edge of night.

She plays with textures, kneading the classic compositions with preliminary knowledge structure, forming a hyper reality - one that its relationship with its representation has been broken.

Ben Dov seemingly arranges and forms the time, tempers the external view with the inner vision until the composition becomes an image of mesmerizing concentration. The works range in the thin line between reality and dream, touching the tender place where the rational and the emotional become one. The murk and light are so balanced until they neutralize each other allowing complete mental freedom.

The compositions correspond with the still life painting tradition and link the eye with the emotion and intellect. The objects mature to metaphors of a spiritual and mysterious essence, inviting the viewer to a new gaze on the familiar. Like a compositor Ben Dov composes her photographs, expropriating them and creating a personification that sparks the imagination: Apple and pepper pairs conspiratorially kiss, the corns wake to life. The objects subsume a Rorschachian quality, one that is inherent to it, and by will be extricated. The direct expression of the composition becomes an agent of a wider meaning. The works draw a mental and spiritual territory that allows a view on the relationship between its inner psychology and the associative property it carries.  The artist points out the attitude of her photographed nature images and evokes the mystery that is trapped in them.

The image is only the calm skin under which, and beyond, the intimate secrets of creation are fermenting. A consciousness image of imagination, desire and ticking time is created. Ben Dov's compositions have an inner mechanism:  a long contemplation invites a feeling of an exciting but fading reality, eternal (as the nature of the photograph) but transient, graspable but full of longing.

Translated by Noa Avron