Sand.Water // Shahaf Levy and Noga farchy

Shahaf Levy and Noga farchy's exhibition Sand.Water, on view now at RawArt Gallery, moves between the quotidian dimension of everyday life and that of the light and minerals of which imagination is made. The exhibition presents two bodies of work, different and distant from each other, expressing two closely related artistic idioms that converse about assembly, longing, and vision, until the boundary between them gradually blurs and they become strata of a shared consciousness.

Shahaf Levy does figurative oil painting. His series of works follows a young couple as they take a walk, pack, or hang out together in their apartment. These quotidian scenes  encompass iconic images from the Israeli canon of the 1940s: the red coffee boiler and the couple next to it are reminiscent of Gutman's "afternoon Nap," the woman with the goat echoes Shalom Sebba's "The Shepherd," and the group of men installing lights resembles the historic photograph "the Inked Flag[SN1] ." These references are not consciously intended and seem to have appeared on the canvas from an uncontrollable voice of collective memory, but they also imbue the familiar episodes from Levy's life with a sense of nostalgia for a distant place that no longer exists.

Noga farchy constructs a sensual world of shapes, colors, and textures in her works. If Levy's close family is Israeli artists and local landscapes, Farhi's is an ancient tribe that exists in another world, which she keeps secret. Her body of work comprises jars and clay sculptures, which she wraps in layers of drawing and burning, in a manner that remains true to her unique voice and resists the call of current trends in contemporary ceramics. Through the clay's uses, she builds an almost ritualistic relationship with the objects, creating an inner world of dream animals and imaginary remnants from a personal or mythic collection.

Both worlds meet in a realm of preservation and hoarding as they present containers, jars, and stone figurines that carry the need for protection, the will to wrap and hold. It is an intimate, personal world, even isolated, where both artists can examine that which is closest to them – the home. Except for several guest appearances, the works do not address the outside very much. It is not that the outside is strange or alienating; it simply does not penetrate the transparent, effective armor that the works are surrounded by. Next to the stone objects and the clay containers, the element of water recurs throughout both artists' works. Water was the medium for primordial life forms, and to this day, our bodies are mostly made of water. Evidently, the attempt to capture liquids and hold them close in a fountain, public pool, hydroponic plants, or drinking jars is an effort to compensate for the distance between people and the natural water source near where they are intended to live.

The exhibition's relationship with Nature is also apparent in the unique range of colors in Levy's painting, which was previously monochromatic; the color green stands out in the boulevard's trees, in the hedges alongside a road in Thailand, in radioactive water, and in a love seat. In Farhi's jars and drawings, the familiar colors blend into an optical flicker reminiscent of Goethe's color theory. Apparently, both artists view the world through a visual arc that is almost non-human and animal, and a clue to this can be found in the presence of many birds in the exhibition. Birds' eyes contain four color receptors, versus three in the human eye, and beyond perceiving a broader color spectrum, birds sense patterns, frequencies, and magnetic fields whose shapes we can only imagine.

Through an animal gaze, the artists suggest the possibility of seeing the world in a way inaccessible to humans, and of devoting oneself to the act of assimilation: to wear the stone, to be covered by the animal, to become part of the elements. Alongside their mutual yearning to return to some primal, domestic, uterine condition, the inward convergence becomes a shutting out of the outside, a parting letter to an impossible reality that had hit hard in the past two years. However, in its significant absence, it turns into a shadow hovering over the works. The water wants to break through the dam, the egg wants to fall and shatter, the consciousness wants to come apart, to go crazy. All that is wrapped and contained might overflow its banks in a single moment and create a flood.

Yasmin Caspin Guetta