Shadows on a Mountainside | Chelouche Gallery
In the exhibition “Shadows on a Mountainside”, the artist Shai Yehezkelli presents a new body of paintings that expands the visual lexicon associated with him. The Jewish-diasporic or Orientalist motifs that characterized Yehezkelli’s previous works, give way to an engagement with the painting’s interior spaces. These extend down a sinking ship, up a mountain, or along an arm buried in the ground; they stretch across screens and doors swarming with ghosts or protrude towards the viewer, a single image on a treated background. Among all these, moving shadows dissolve the solidity of the image into restless activity, forever trapped between the painting’s four sides.
The exhibition’s title, which can suggest invisible danger as well as a small comfort on a hot day, resonates in this exhibition as a comic-tragic undertone. For Yehezkelli, the shadow, that same primordial painting technique for achieving the illusion of depth, allows him to engage in whispers and eavesdropping; that is, to listen to the painting.
Text: Keren Goldberg