Doron Brachfeld | Rust Never Sleeps
June 13 - July 20, 2024
Solo Show: Doron Brachfeld
"And time slowly becomes a separate, heavy entity, hanging above us like a yellowing, suffocating layer of haze." (David Grossman, Yellow Time, 1987).
Time's layer of haze, like a coating of rust covering iron, is the same yellow shade of the sunflowers blooming in the fields of the Jezreel Valley and the western Negev, which also marks metal parts for construction. These signs of time, rust and yellow, are all one can see in Doron's workshop. Standing amongst the sculptures reminds you that iron is the main element of Earth's mass. When it is rusty, after years of contact with water and oxygen, it evokes a feeling of grounding and nostalgia, it is familiar to us, and brings back a dimension of time and warmth to the local.
For members of mine and Doron's generation, that nostalgia is for the late 1970s. Neil Young's album, Rust Never Sleeps, which the exhibition is named after, plays in the background. Doron's restless rust takes us back to the days of plows moving in the Jezreel Valley's early mornings. There is a "political" tension between it and the gallery's white walls, like the tension between the torn parts of the Israeli society. In a time characterized by the uncanny, alienation, and discomfort within an intimate and familiar space, rust serves as a reminder.
Doron and I grew up at the same latitude and served together in the military, and in Lebanon. This rust also brings us back to the movement of tanks around Aley and Beirut, and to the days of the Gaza Strip. In the sculptures of the exhibition, I also see fragmented bits of cars and armored personnel carriers that become a silent testimony. In a different time, they could have been the remnants of my and Doron's testimonies. The physical and metaphorical explosion has brought into the gallery the fallout of shrapnel that came to us from outer space as if they were "moonlashes."
Guy Raz, May 2024
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Links
Doron Brachfeld, Rahaf, 2024, 143x49x21 cm
Doron Brachfeld, Rust Never Sleeps, 2024, installation view at RawArt Gallery, photo by David Scouri
Doron Brachfeld, Edge, 2024, 44.5x115x19 cm
Doron Brachfeld, Bubble, 2024, 101x70x40 cm
Doron Brachfeld, Drought, 2024, 54x35x16 cm
Doron Brachfeld, Moonlash, 2024, 200x195x100 cm
Doron Brachfeld, Raft, 2024, 83.5x206x32 cm