Page 115 - Art-In-Vogue

 SPARKS, 2008 ACRYLIC ON CANvAS 61X73 IN. /155X185 CM. «
rotem reShef  FINGER LAKES, 2007 ACRYLIC ON CANvAS 36X48 IN. /91X122 CM.
 thE REEF, 2006 ACRYLIC ON CANvAS 60X70 IN. /150X180 CM.
Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel  wORLDS, 2009 ACRYLIC ON CANvAS 38X63 IN. /100X160 CM.

THE ARTIST ONLINE www.RotemReshef.com

They suggest something that is beyond our familiarity with the world. By
doing this they expand our sight. The painting holds within it the twofold
nature of something between spontaneity and master plan. The technique
Reshef created and refined constantly alters the painting. The merging of
colors and the fluid texture of the canvas; the different levels of absorption
and expansion of paint, assimilation and blending of color; the filled spaces
and the voids left exposed - all take part in creating the final piece. Thus,
when exhibited, the painting is present as a constant event. Reshef's
painting is a document, an action, an event and a narrative. It documents
an occurrence that happened around it and upon it in the artist's studio,
and it exists as a constant event of seeing. But the tension between the
temporary and permanent in Reshef's painting is not only part of the history
of its working process, but is a part of their performance in space. The
colors and forms created by the blind dazzling that occurs when staring
at the sun with eyes shut constitute a gaze into the light and into the skin
and subsequently into abstraction and into the body. In the still dark of the
eye, the affect of the glittering light dims the relations between interior
and exterior, and between abstraction and figuration. Reshef's paintings
are all sight and a desire to see. They were born in the bright blindness of
staring directly at the sun with eyes shut. The drama that takes place in
this stillness; the attempt of the eye within the eye to follow the spots of
light within the darkness is carried on in Reshef's Paintings. The pivot of
Reshef's painting is light and color. Both alter and lead the eye to different
places and both are there inside it.

Reshef's abstraction fixes the viewer as the one to link the elements, the
one to follow the light of the image. At the core of Reshef's work is the
desire to see. It links color, which is the basis for form in her paintings,
with light, which is the basis for seeing. Excerpt. Joshua Simon
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