Passage International No.5
Nira Itzhaki
The joint exhibition of the Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis and the Israeli artist Gal Weinstein is the 5th project in the series of Passage: International Art Encounters, taking place at the Chelouch Gallery for Contemporary Art.
This exhibition’s mutual installation comprised of works by both artists keeps a dialogue with the architectonic structure of the gallery. Not only has it transformed the entire space, but made the space an integral part of the work. Pedro Cabrita Reis (born 1956 in Lisbon, Portugal) has erected four red silicate pillars which join floor and ceiling. Three of them had been broken by violent hammer blows which made them look like archeological debris of part of a construction site. To the fourth pillar, which stands opposite to the Gallery’s entrance, a glass jug full of water is adhered with brown tape stripes. In another space within the gallery Cabrita Reis placed three large paintings. Gal Weinstein (born 1970 in Israel) has hung white transparent silicone drapes (sweeping the floor) and thus creating a magnificent transparent, illuminated curtain. They divide the gallery’s space into three smaller spaces, in which the pillars and Cabrita Reis’ paintings are placed.
The real space behind the silicone drapes turns into part of an imaginary space existing in the spectator’s eyes, whereas the drape becomes the meeting place of the physical and the imaginary reality.
The silicone drapes, resembling waterfalls or shining transparent beds, function as territory definers. The spectator has to decide whether or not to become physically involved in the work. The passage between the silicon drapes, which enable the movement from one space into another, turns the spectator into an active participant in the installation.
Cabrita Reis’ brick pillars and Weinstein’s silicone drapes deal with the relationship between art and architecture within the space and time dimensions, and raise questions about reality “fooling” space as well as doubts and uncertainty evoked by different viewing possibilities.
Both artists have chosen simple everyday objects and materials such as silicate bricks and silicone, which lack any special identity, and used them as components of their architectonic structures – sensuous and spiritual at the same time.
In their theatrical style, their humor, irony and lack of functionality both artists share a common language. The reflections, beauty and elegance contrasting the rigidity, sensuality and meditativeness create additional joints between these artists. Both deal with the deceptiveness of perspective, as well as the contrasts shown by inside-outside, positive-negative relations, and both attempt to weaken reality and blur the capacity of the spectator to see the real space.
The dialogue between both artists in this mutual exhibition within the framework of the passage series is so perfect, that the spectator could not distinguish one from another, for their work merges into one. This exhibition, in which everything becomes part of everything, creates a new range of associations open to various commentary and observation modes. This is the moment when the spectator moves from reality into a quasi non-site of a Zenic spirit of existence of its own.
