Assaf Rahat – Lone Ranger
06.09.2024-19. 10.2024
Curator : Nira Itzhaki
The name ‘Lone Ranger’ seems as if it was borrowed from a 50’s or 60’s Western in which a lone rider without a name is seen galloping on his horse in the American prairies. Is it the nameless man played by the legendary Clint Eastwood, the hero in Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns? Or is he the knight who returns from the underworld to seek revenge in the film ‘A City Named Hell’ directed by Eastwood himself? Maybe it is Don Quixote, the hero of Cervantes, who fought windmills with Sancho Panza, or perhaps it is the fictitious inventor of stories, the delusional Baron Munchausen riding on the back of his faithful horse.
Perhaps the name was borrowed from the group of expressionist painters ‘The Blue Rider’, which succeeded ‘The Bridge’ group in 1911 (whose artists include Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc) and whose name was inspired by a children’s fairy tale about a knight who sets out to right the wrongs of the world?
The same Lone Ranger shines in my paintings on his horse. galloping quickly towards an unknown destination through different picturesque scenes, sometimes an active and visible participant in their occurrence, and sometimes unseen (the painting reflects his feverish imagination). In my paintings, the lone Ranger is both the storyteller and the protagonist, present and absent.
What are the stories he tells, and what is his identity? Riding his horse, he moves through the mental spaces of human culture – the history of art and shared human archetypes. Armed with a sword, perhaps it is a brush or a pencil as it is with Aaron and the purple pencil where he creates for himself hybrid spaces within which he races. They are dense and, sometimes, isolated, existential spaces. The spaces were selected from fragments of various visual vignettes, international and Israeli artistic mythologies such as Beuys’s hat, rabbit and coyote, Aviva Uri’s painted eye and line, Caravaggio’s amputations, Bruce Nauman’s hand, Van Gogh’s ear and more.
The Lone Ranger conceives images from his imagination and hallucinations, connects the images, between the parts of different realities originating from other times and sources, and creates a dynamic, physical, and mental world for himself. This is not an ideal or comforting world, far from it, it is as if it was taken from Goya’s nightmares of the horrors of war that appear in his black paintings, from those of Dante or the hell of Hieronymus Bosch, but at the same time it is a vital, diffuse and developing creative world, which crosses borders between the dead and the living, between Thanatos and Eros, between reality and imagination, between world and underworld, between the mental and the physical.
This Lone Ranger is me.
Assaf Rahat.
Assaf Rahat (b. 1970) is a fascinating Israeli artist who lives and works in Tel-Aviv, a graduate of the Beit Berel Art School (1998). Rahat usually paints with unconventional materials such as sewing threads, plastic glue, and more, alongside works in traditional oil paints, self-produced tempera, and watercolors.
Rahat’s choice of unconventional materials gives rise to expressive, disturbing, and emotional works of art. In addition to material research, Rahat is engaged in researching the artist’s place and the creative processes through self-portraiture and expressive work and the relationship between the private and mental spaces. His intimate descriptions represent images from memory and introspection and include household objects, faces, intimate scenes, preoccupation with sexuality, and death.
Rahat’s works have been exhibited in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Haifa Museum of Arts, as well as in many solo exhibitions, including:
Aviva’s Eye, Beuys’s Body, Bar-David Museum, Kibbutz Baram (2023), The Way We Survive, Petach Tikva Museum of Art (2021), ‘Atavizem’, Sapir School of Art and Culture (2020), Night of the Minotaur, Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv (2018), Totem-Thread, Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot Gallery (2018), Strip, Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv (2016), Chimera, Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv (2014), Inside Outwards, Yair Art Gallery, Tel Aviv (2014) and more. Among the group exhibitions in which he participated: Evocations: A Nomadic Exhibition Project | Faur Zsófi Gallery, Budapest, Hungary (2023), Howl, Dana Gallery (2023), Naked Soul: Chaim Soutine and Israeli Art, Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod (2019), Wire(less) connections, Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2016), Open notebooks, Herzliya Museum (2016), STOPOVER, MG+ MSUM (Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova) (2013), BoysCraft, Haifa Museum of Art (2007).