Orna Degani | Corner of Ahad Ha'am and Herzl

Curator: Irena Gordon

Orna Degani: Corner of Ahad Ha'am and Herzl

The aggressive change in urban landscape constitutes the foundation for Orna Degani’s painting in oil, pencils and pastels. She uses this foundation as a springboard for examining the language of painting, the meaning of representation, and her civilian resistance and protest against present reality. Degani chooses to turn the spotlight on urban metamorphoses enhanced by strong political and financial forces. In her current series of paintings, Degani focuses on the various stages of one urban reconstruction site, following the builders who disappear and reappear between the scaffolding and building sheets. Her painting is not a work of documentation, nor does it attempt to magnify or dramatize everyday scenes. Based on photographs taken over a long period of time, she transforms the process of building, this intermediary stage of appearance, into a realm of painterly structures and surfaces.

For one year she followed the historic preservation and renovation work of three buildings in Tel Aviv, mainly of the Litvinsky House, at 22 Ahad Ha'am Street, which was one of the first edifices to be built in the Ahuzat Bayit neighborhood in the early days of Tel Aviv. The Herzliya Gymnasium is situated at the end of the street, where Ahad Ha'am meets Herzl Street, both named after two forefathers of Zionism. It was the first Hebrew school in the world, inaugurated in 1905. The Litvinsky Residency was founded in 1909 by a wealthy trader named Yaakov Elhanan Litvinsky, who had immigrated to Israel from Odessa. The ongoing architectural additions and changes, which were completed in the 1930's, gave the building its eclectic character. It was considered one of the most elaborate and spacious edifices at the time; however, over the years it had been thoroughly neglected. Its present comprehensive and meticulous renovation process has not been different from most of the preservation projects in Israel today: it is part of a real estate deal where the investor funding the preservation work has been granted generous construction shares. As was to be expected, a large residential building owned by the real estate company that had vowed to fund the preservation work is now casting its shadow over the Litvinsky House on the one side, and over another historical building on the other - the Adler House, which has been much less fortunate than the former, for one of the high-rise's columns perforates its interior and another leans on its right side. Furthermore, its inside has been converted into a gym for the residents of the new building. The Litvinsky House on the other hand, is still standing empty, as the investor's plans for it are yet to be revealed.

Degani, a second-generation Tel Avivian, whose grandfather was a road builder in the young city and its surroundings in the 1920's, draws on the reality that surrounds her. She seeks to depict life in the present time and place through painting. She does not paint urbanity through a wide lens, as a vast landscape, or from a distant overlook, but instead she chooses a drastically close-up view, adjusting her gaze to focus on the "innards" of a single occurrence, which includes the scaffolding, the builders working on them and the sheets used in the constructing process. These elements become both metaphorical and formal motifs in her paintings.

When examining the formal aspect of her paintings, the transparent or opaque canvases and nylon sheets are turned into systems of movement and spaces of color that are almost abstract, reaching the point where they engage a part of the composition of both the image and the painting. Degani chooses to deal with representations of forms that are yet to be completed and perfected, that are a visual chaos in their current state. She transforms them into clear arrays of paintings. Metaphorically, the intermediary stages of the building's construction and the figures of the workers are interwoven into the actual and the painterly construction but are also trapped inside it. Thus they map out the contradictory processes of beneficial renovation at the expense of cultural heritage, processes that change not only the face of the city but also its residents' way of living, their modes of thought, their very personality. A substantial amount of ironic and critical components overtly appear in part of the paintings. In others, the visual composition is self-referential, offering a visual dance of surfaces and forms, opaque and transparent, which strive for inner balance.

In addition to the series of construction paintings, the exhibition displays a series of pastel paintings of palm trees, eucalyptuses and cypresses that had been in the city for decades, which were uprooted in the framework of the massive construction, leaving the city deserted of the flora that is so crucial to urban life. In these works, which present an extension of her former exhibition displayed two years ago at the Tel Aviv Artists House, she gives the trees a heroic, almost divine status, depicting them in all their glory, defiled and unrooted, floating inside the white space of the paper, detached from any particular landscape, coming to life as powerful drawn entities. The combination of the construction paintings and the tree works in the exhibition unveils Degani's different perceptions and approaches to landscape. They reflect the complexity of her gaze in relation to reality as well as her emotions towards it. The experience of representation is conjured up by the works, evolving out of the tension between the covering and the unveiling, the material and the transparent, the figurative and the abstract.

Irena Gordon