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23/9/2007

Nadav Weissman

Juana de Aizpuru Gallery, Madrid

Ground Foor

Juana de Aizpuru Gallery starts its exhibitions season with the show “Ground Floor”, from the artist Nadav Weissman (Haifa, 1969). The exhibition has several pieces which genre is hard to define, alternating well cared installations, where he mixes in an ambiguous way, all kind of media with paintings and video, that end up complementing the meaning of the installations, giving the exhibition a unity which would be hard to reach in any other way.

Just the origin of the artist makes us look at his works with different eyes, trying to unmask the difficulty we found on comprehend a whole culture’s frustration. This way the border becomes the leit motiv that guides us from one piece to another. The border. Such an abstract term, which only objective is to delimit one thing from another, something never accomplished. In the show that is presented by the Israeli artist, who works and lives in Tel-Aviv, we can appreciate a curious balance resulted from mixing several opposed elements; this happens both in technique and theme, going through the plasticity of somewhat opposite forms. Is in this perfect counterweight where we find the border. So perfect that it is not shown to men’s eyes.

The installation, like the curious glass cases, turned out to be recipients of the impossible, whilst conserving in its interior the volatile, the solid, the invisible… Other times he shows us what cannot be touched, like the bones. They are there, we all know it, they are the skeleton that supports us, but no one dares to touch them: it is forbidden, and in spite of it he gives them a comic-grotesque nature that vanishes them out of their lexical conscience, turning them into objects belonging to the art game.

On the paintings the exact same thing happens; he contrasts the charcoal with oil to show us a great scale of recreational visual games where there are no limits on where the childish nor the adult part is. The artists use to have the luck of maintaining a puerile vision, in a longed for sense, of things and it is in this innocence of his representations where he can show better this symbolic, expressive, communicative charge that exists in the exhibition.

The message is not clear, and it is not intended to be that way, it is sensitive. The original big figures, that scatter over the Gallery, have a lot of macabre, of grotesque rather than comic, which already is an allegory of the universal society nowadays. Nadav’s tendency is to allude to less worldwide problems, but the beauty of his works lies on the way he achieves them, from a such personal intimacy that touches the psychological boundaries. The daily images are the ones from the game of opposites that suppose surviving, the ones Weissman shows us in their works, either in a plastic way or through the conjunction of varied solid elements: what can be touched and what is prohibited for us. Therefore, the aesthetic should not be necessarily modern, contemporary, and much less belong to tradition; it should be simple, and candidly personal, ripped out from the artist’s entrails.

The dialogue on the territory could not be missing in the work by Weissman, but it is more about sensitive territories rather tan geographic territories. The in-out, center-periphery dialogue is what occupies a big part of the greatest artists these days, since globalization has gained great advantage in the art world. However, it is always welcome the fact that there are still good artists, moreover young artists, who are capable of extend a thin recreational fog over our world’s disasters, and that they do it from themselves, from inside.
Javier Torras de Ugarte

Juana de Aizpuru Gallery
Calle Barquillo, 44 - Madrid

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