Wind Words

Litvak Gallery

Tel Aviv Feb. 2024

Hadas Glazer curator

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“May words which are like the wind be stopped? or what is troubling you to make answer to them?”

(Job 16: 3)

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Reuven Zahavi presents paintings of wild weeds and grass sprouting in different soils – some emerge from the cracks in generic asphalt pavements and others from the charred soil of Mount Eitan (in the wake of the 2021 wildfires in the Jerusalem mountains). The paintings show tension between realism and abstract fields of color. In the exhibition, Zahavi’s paintings are charged with the symbolic prism of still life, which imbues the wild weeds with double meaning. On the one hand, they represent low, disruptive and wild form of life. On the other hand, they represent the bursting life force, the first buds of life after the earth has been scorched, life that emerges and spreads despite everything, anywhere it can. Next to them, a still life painting depicts a charred branch and a sooty beer bottle taken from the wildfire area. Left behind, these salvaged objects are painted with fineness and compassion that reveal fragility and pain.

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