Sometimes you see a fork and wish to die.

Since ancient times, painting has harnessed the object as a means for us to discuss our humanity. We place things upon the canvas to gaze through them at ourselves: nature is silent so that we may speak. The genre of still life is a long-standing tradition that found its distinct home in painting; it is composed of canvas and paint, brush and gaze. The painter's gaze is that of an individual inviting many eyes to a private moment. He demarcates the boundaries of life within the boundaries of the canvas and says: This is the world for now. Let us look at it.

“Still life is the world minus its narratives,” writes Norman Bryson. Still life refuses drama and expels the human presence from the canvas. The human is absent from the world, leaving behind only the gaze of time, the medium in which the human operates. Over the past two years, Sagie Azoulay has turned to a silent painterly tradition, a subject seldom addressed locally. He says: This is the world for now. Let us look at it.

Azoulay's still life exists in the gap between the tradition of the Low Countries' Stilleven and the Nature Morte of the Catholic South. After the object detached from the human and began to appear alone as the subject of the painting, the term "Quiet Life" immortalized the serene and vital existence of lavish meals, flowers, and gleaming silverware, while the term "Dead Nature" pointed to the bitter end of animal carcasses, time running out, and the death lurking for all. It seems that the Hebrew translation, Teva Domem (Silent Nature), avoids choosing between the two. It emphasizes the silence dwelling here, in our local present. Azoulay's works are made of this material.

Contrary to tradition, the paintings in this exhibition were not created purely from observation, but from memory and imagination. The works do not document what Meyer Schapiro calls the "kinship of the painter and his objects," but rather present a distant gaze at what is not there: duplications, reflections, and reproductions of images. Here is an "apple," here is a "banana," here are "flowers." The objects are placed on a pedestal in a dim environment, out of context, without time or place. Behind them, a theater curtain marks the show. This is “the showing of the showing,״ according to Bertolt Brecht.

The works in Still Life Without a Head. are a representation of a representation. The image looks at itself, a mirror facing a mirror, in a circle devoid of origin, presenting a frozen dialogue. Thus, the works refuse the transfiguration inherent to the secret of the stillness of painting itself. They point instead to the absent, that which is not presented. But we are here. What are we looking at now? Here is the apple, here is the banana, here are flowers. The clamor of history and reality remains outside the canvas, and yet it is still present. The still life waives memento mori, for here and now, we do not need art to remind us of death.

This is also the moment when we notice that alongside the paintings, another space exists, external, at the back of the gallery. There, the black becomes tangible matter, a heavy concrete screen covering the white wall, upon which paintings can no longer be displayed. From the floor emerges a head made of darkness, separate from the still life. The rest is silence.

Nir Shauloff, January 2026 

Supported by The Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, Tel Aviv