Daysleeper

Are we facing a process of creation or erasure? Of subsistence or disappearance? In a series of intimate drawings, Assaf Rahat draws homeless figures, whom he meets on the city’s boulevards and alleys. The figures seem indifferent to their environs, indrawn, curled up to sleep on a bench surrounded by vegetation at the heart of urban bustle. Documentary in nature, the drawings strive to capture, in a brief moment of arrest, observation of people who have lost their whole world and are left with only the outdoors as a home, as their struggle for survival is exposed to all. One of these street dwellers is fused with a self-portrait of the artist, thus articulating the lurking danger and the fear of losing everything underlying human existence.

Irena Gordon