​​Ran

When the date for the exhibition was set, I invited the curator Meital Raz, whom I met a while back, to visit my studio. The meeting mainly revolved around the question of whether painting – in its conventional appearance – is sufficient. Meital had argued that one way to make the medium of painting relevant is to incorporate it into the language of installation. I felt, as opposed to Meital’s position, that this is not a decisive argument. Indeed, sometimes, an installation of painting and an interference of it, just like installation art, is an appropriate platform, but in other cases, paintings are best when displayed in the simple and classic way.

In the case of the current exhibition, there is no clear-cut answer. But not because of a difficulty to determine or to adjudicate, but mainly because this exhibition is centered entirely around painting. Whether it is on canvas, paper or on the wall or whether it directly intervenes in space, changes it, affected by it and reacts to it. Our approaches, which at first seemed contradictory and impossible to bridge, sparked me and nourished my painting, and in fact, this whole exhibition. During our meetings, I realized we do not hold opposite views, and even more importantly – our point of connection is the key to this exhibition.

This proposition does not rushes to declare that only painting is sufficient. Nor does it seek to resolve or reconcile this issue but to unite between installation and painting in its various appearances, and to offer it as endless possibilities, which exists in the tension between seemingly contradictory poles. The idea of relating to installation in this exhibition is merely an expansion of my artistic practice, which sees painting as a vivid and flexible medium whose boundaries were never the margins of the canvas, but the boundaries of freedom and imagination.

The title of this exhibition is a direct continuation of the dialogue which was developed between Meital and me, as well as the exhibition itself that displays only painting. In the same manner our encounter seemed at first as a struggle which requires a clear-cut decision, or a single truth, so as the first confrontation with the exhibition’s provocative title that raises questions of yes or no. Further examination will reveal the fact that the title acknowledges that the existence of all things summed up in painting, the necessity in life that becomes painting, painting that is life and the everlasting movement between them.

Mei Tal

This exhibition is an encounter between a painter and a curator, who enabled the gallery space to lead them and to dictate the pictorial and curatorial processes. The exhibition is divided into two parts and displays new works by Barlev, which was created in the past year. In the main gallery room, a series of interior paintings – all of which are based on black color. These are intimate domestic environments that look as if built out of darkness. In the inner room – a panoramic work on paper, an experimental and crude painting divided into seven parts and which is characterized by fierce refraction and amputations of the composition.

These two series of works coexist in a stable equilibrium between proximity and estrangement and disclose the dual nature of Barlev’s work, kind of a two-headed monster, which on the one hand, is deeply rooted in the tradition of contemporary painting – with clear affinity to expressive artists such as Francis Bacon, whose work is known for its disturbed, claustrophobic and sensual atmosphere. And on the other hand, his work resides at a critical point in modern painting, specifically in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was abandoned in favor of new and subversive mediums which it could not resist . Barlev draws inspiration from minimalist sculptors, who sought to establish a new relationship between the physical space and the work of art. In minimalist sculpture, the experience of space becomes a crucial goal. As with minimalists, so too Barlev’s work, which attempts to reintroduce these issues into the pictorial sphere. These two axes are structuring his works, which range between various and opposite poles – intimate and alienated, premeditated and loose, chaotic and well-planned.

Francis Bacon, who was obsessed with the human body, maintained that “we are all flesh”. For Bacon, the body was nothing but material. This idea was well reflected in his monstrous abstraction, which expressed the temporality of the body and its terrifying emptying, both mentally and painterly. Barlev adores furniture the same way Bacon admired the human body. His studio is an inexhaustible source of home design catalogues (mostly IKEA catalogues) that serve as a preliminary basis for his paintings. The well designed compositions – both the arrangement of space in the catalogue and the compositions of the catalogues themselves – function as an anchor of immaculateness and geometrical order. Barlev chooses to paint from photographs in which he finds a potential for disruption. He sabotages the original image, erases it, blurs and smudges areas which he perceives as crisis-laden, either because a load of color or the lack of it. These actions undermine the balance and serenity, making his painting a mental territory of threat and alienation, which creates a sense of danger and discomfort. The black colors, a prominent presence in the new series of works, emphasize more forcefully the emotional residue of the paintings. The black background is seeping into the anonymous furniture items, which in response are absorbing and dissolving into an abysmal and chaotic surface. The blur, fluidness and deletion serve Barlev as an aesthetic code, which sketches a theatrical and cryptic domestic environment, stressing the silent cry of the emptied objects.

The pictorial field is not halted by the canvas but leaks to the actual space of the gallery in form of a reversed evolution – from the canvas to the paper and from the paper to the wall. The new series of paintings, displayed at a central hall of the gallery, is complemented by color strips (Zips), which Barlev drew on the wall. On the one hand, this act seems as merely a decorative gesture which refers to the graphic strips in home design catalogues. On the other hand, the reduced formality of the zips on the walls provide the painting with a third dimension, its boundaries are violated with deliberate defiance, and thus becomes a genuine physical gesture. The symmetrical and singular zips, just like the human body, connect the painting to the place, while echoing the works of the minimalist artist John McCracken, who used color as a basis of the sculptural domain. The McCracken-like painted zips are emerging again in the inside hall with the panoramic painting, which appears as undergoing even much severe process of blurring and deleting. Acrylic zips are implanted among the corroded furniture – a broken and imputed rhythm of prosaic domestic spaces – which look as a rebellious antithesis to the loosened liquidity and deletion.

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In the next few months 121 Gallery is going to close its doors in favor of newly residential building. During the preparation for the exhibition, we wondered what would happen to the wall paintings, and how absurd it would be to renovate the walls of the gallery and return them to their original white color, just before the place designated for demolition. But on second thought – these are precisely the materials from which Barlev’s works are made. The spatial vanishing and dissolving, a common thread in his work, will become actual at the end of the exhibition. Perhaps this is the theme of this exhibition – the drama of evaporating spaces.