“And the moon sent out its beams, its rays of light. They touched the black spots on her dress and in an instant, the spots disappeared… Instead there was light! What had been a black stain now gleamed and glistened...Every sooty mark had become a patch of radiance…Hannale’s dress was covered with buttons and beads of pure silver light that shone  and sparkled…”

(Hannale’s Sabbath dress, Yitzhak Damiel)  

SHEHORA LESHABBAT / BLACK FOR SABBATH

Tova Lotan

Peering out of the canvases in Tova Lotan’s latest series of paintings is a pair of Hebrew words: “shehora leshabbat” – black for Sabbath.  In a process of revealing and concealing, closure and exposure, Lotan weaves the words into her compositions, sandwiching them between lush layers of pigment.

The words echo through more than fifty canvases of identical size, with the technique and the inner mechanism of each work  conducting a dialogue with art history, folklore, arts and crafts, color theory, formalism and, ultimately,  Israeli art, which returns to the written word in the absence of an artistic tradition to fall back upon.

In his book “The Color Star” (1921), Johannes Itten presents a color wheel that combines “objective” laws of color and subjective feelings drawn from psychology, philosophy, religion and the world of emotion.  He claims that the use of color can be a path to personal discovery, achieved through abstract thinking, attentiveness and total surrender to color.

Tova Lotan’s Black for Sabbath series begins with three paintings, each in a primary color. This is the artistic platform upon which the whole series is based. If the three primary colors are mixed in the right proportions, the result reflects so little light that it appears black, conceptually leading to the pair of words which constitute the textual anchor of the entire collection: “Black for Sabbath.”

Lotan creates uniformly square canvases, thick with paint, that form a grid. They are a kind of log of the ongoing work process in the studio, a record of artistic research. The paintings become twin images of sameness and difference: They move between assembly-line cloning and duplication, and the unique, singular and one-of-a-kind. The word pair repeats itself like a mantra, in the same font in every work, while the color scheme changes and the coordinates move, disrupting the view. The relationship between them is carefully measured and calculated, creating a kind of symmetrical target, while at the same time raising questions about the balance between image and word, between color and shape, and between actual words and abstract artistic expression.

The artistic model repeats itself like a stencil: The format, the use of a single word pair, the Sisyphean exploration of the medium, call to mind the tradition of a labor-intensive handicraft such as embroidery (which appears frequently in the artist’s previous work). In this repetitive, ongoing  work, Lotan discovers something liberating and enabling. Every painting in the series continues or harks back to the one that went before. Exploring the nuances and the compositions, she gathers up the energy from each painting and funnels it into one big wall mural that resembles a pendulum of time.

By welding the words “black” and “Sabbath,” and placing them in a richly colored setting, Lotan critically reexamines the different mythic meanings of these words and tries to illuminate them, breathe life into them and recolor them. The Sabbath, a sacred day of rest in Jewish tradition, recalls and symbolizes the order of Creation. According to the French Jewish philosopher Emmanual Levinas, one of the core principles of the Sabbath is human liberty and equality (Nine Talmudic Readings, 2001): Observance of the Sabbath is the domain of man. It is a means of freeing man from the order and constraints of the everyday. It is a day imbued with religious, historical and also sociological significance.

The color black has many connotations and meanings across cultures. In practice, it is the darkest of colors, perceived visually as the lack of light reaching the eye. It connotes gloom, grief and emptiness, but also lust and desire. It has the potential, like a black hole, to contain within it the entire spectrum of colors as well as light.

The union of these two words merges the sacred and the profane. It illuminates social-political aspects of existence. Beneath the colorful façade there is a layer of “black.” The Sabbath is the radiant face, a seductive envelope for that which lies underneath.  The phrase, which appears in first-person feminine, bubbles up from under, and in between, the festive layers of the Sabbath, reminding us of the black side that we do not wish to see, like the black stain on the Sabbath dress.

In modern times, painting has become a religion, a pursuit of the meta-narrative. “Black for Sabbath” challenges that. It accentuates the dismal, labor-intensive side of the process, offering an ironic wink. It grapples with the yearning for holiness and the sublime in modern abstract painting. It adorns itself in glowing colors and knowingly portrays the painting as a glittering illusion. Lotan says: “Painting is work. It is not prayer, or divine or holy. There is nothing sublime in art but rather a link between the profane and life.”

Hanging in the gallery opposite this large series are small landscape paintings. These paintings depict a kind of local utopia. They show the entrance gate to a rural community outside the city – a highly localized image that links up to the Israeli myth of farm labor and agricultural collectives. The gate symbolizes the instinctive but ingrained need for security, for protected borders, for making the desert bloom, for extolling the greatness of the land. But it is a picture of utopia divested of its content and promise. The image is repeated over and over, seductively calling to the viewer but with a wink. We could almost be looking at the gates of paradise, painted in glowing poster colors. But the realism of the landscapes is disrupted by a strange, radiant colorfulness, reminding us that this is not a depiction of a concrete location but a passage to somewhere else, abstract but critical, taking us back to “painting” and the portrayal of an autonomous place full of shapes and relationships.

The exhibit offers a series of luminous, mythic narratives that are but a fragile coating for the inner core of Lotan’s work. The longer one observes these stationary compositions on the wall, the more the volume builds up. Through the slits and ragged edges on the surface of the painting, viewers gain insight   into the process by which Lotan finds freedom.

Nir Harmat, curator

(Translation from the Hebrew: Gila Brand)