MUTE
Curator: Tamar Dresdner
The name for Gil Desiano-Biton’s solo exhibition, Horror Upon the City, is
taken from a song bearing this name in Dudu Tassa’s latest album. Lyricist
Eli Eliahu borrowed the name from the Book of Jeremiah 15, 8: "Their widows
are increased to me above the sand of the seas: I have brought upon them
against the mother of the young men a spoiler at noonday: I have caused
him to fall upon it suddenly, and Horror Upon the City." In this chapter G-d
answers Jermiah’s prayers and tells him that on top of all the misfortunes
He has visited upon His people, more is still to come. Jeremiah delivers this
doomsday prophesy to the people and the sense of impending disaster is
palpable in this chapter.
Some of the paintings in the exhibition are reminiscent of imaginary
ruined cities, non-specific places after a disaster, ruins hanging by a thread,
suspended in a void. Is this a place, an idea or a meditation of a place? In a
certain sense, the paintings bring to mind the descriptions in Italo Calvino’s[1]
book, Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo talks with Kublai Khan and describes
fictional cities with feminine names. He describes subterranean and heavenly
cities as well as a city reflected in a lake, the description of which reminds me
of the painting which is also the exhibition’s namesake - Horror Upon the City.
“Your cities do not exist. Indeed they might never have existed at all. Surely
they will never ever exist”, Kublai Khan comments on Marco Polo descriptions.
In Desiano Biton’s earlier works, the departure point was an image, which
got covered by thick layers of paint. These were then partially peeled away
Gil Desiano Biton
to expose different portions of the image, which by now had lost its intrinsic
identity. These paintings dealt not with the abstraction itself, but rather
with the content which had undergone the abstraction, through subtracting
something from the image. The hierarchy was clear – painting and image were
unequal, they were in constant conflict with the image perpetually ending
up on the losing side. The image was in service of the painting, it was there
merely to be superseded, abused, covered by the painting, and only then could
parts of it be rediscovered. In his song Horror Upon the City, Eliahu wrote, man
must leave signs of a struggle behind him, and in those works it seems that
Desiano Biton was struggling with his personal biography and history.
The pictures presented in the current exhibition are a continuation
of this play of obscuring and revelation, although technically it has been
structured differently. The desire not to expose all still lingers at the heart of
the work. The painting is built up with successive layers covering one another,
where only snippets of the lower layers are exposed and revealed while the
rest remains hidden to the eye. In these works, Desiano Biton distances
himself from the canvas and hurls the paint in broad gestures. Thanks to
this distance, the artist becomes both painter and observer. The observer’s
standpoint is by definition a critical one; it compels him to take responsibility
for his actions and to take a stand.
The works combine the fresh energy of learning, curiosity, new techniques
and profound understanding of the nature of painting with a dense energy
of the release, the disintegration, fragmentation and collapse. The painting
is made up of contradicting forces – particles and surfaces, cold and warm
colors, sketches and patches, nature and urban. These contrasts evoke in the
viewr a sense of dizziness, falling, instability and discomfort.
The imagery in the paintings bursts out of the layers of paint and
establishes a presence on the surface. An explosion strewing fragments and
shards on the canvas, helplessly drifting. It is an image of an old tape recorder,
taken from family photos taken at the artist’s circumcision ceremony, where
the recorder stood beside the infant. It seems that the conflict with Desiano
Biton’s personal history is supplanted by the desire to view things rationally.
The recorder, or the spot representing it, stands solitary facing forces
greater than its own, at the heart of an abstraction larger than itself, which
occupies a larger space on the canvas and at times seems poised to drown
it out altogether. This juxtaposition is reminiscent of the romantic movement
in painting, which grew out of early 19th-century Europe, where the works
were characterized by bold colors, free-flowing patchiness and contrasting
insignificant man with the sublime, with the immense forces of nature.
In spite of the relative inferiority of the size of the recorder in the overall
composition, it is in this device that the biographical key lies, with which
the works can be decrypted. In most works the tape is a photograph that
has been peeled away, as if Desiano Biton tries to strip it of its skin and its
very substance, to turn it into just another patch in the composition. In other
works it is painted. The image of the tape recorder varies from one work to
another in size and position, however contrary to the rest of the fragments in
the painting, it is always laid on a painted line, which supports it. By its very
nature, the tape recorder is supposed to produce sounds, but its presence in
the painting is mute and it seems as though it is standing idly, watching the
universe as it disintegrates. The experience of viewing the paintings is similar
to watching a movie in which a loud, intense soundtrack is suddenly muted
and total silence prevails while the motion and energy persist; a freeze-frame
storm of sorts.
Of all the elements in those old family photos, why did the artist choose
to dwell on the tape recorder? What made it catch his gaze? Is it a silent
witness? Does it represent the onlooker? Could it be that the choice is
motivated by a reluctance to plant clues in the painting, to escape from
reality, to evade a narrative? Is the blurring of the image an attempt to blur the personal the autobiographical? Is the tape recorder standing in as an element
of defamiliarization?
It is no coincidence that some of the works lack a title and the names
of others are extremely abstract, for example – Howls in the Field of
Consciousness. Desiano Biton does not want to give the viewer even a thread
to hang onto, a thread that might guide and navigate one through the work’s
expanses. He leaves his work open to interpretation, to a multilayered
reading and submission to the viewer's subjectivity. At the root of this choice
is the realization that even when the primary motivation for creating an art
work is a private experience, it cannot remain in that space, it must strive
towards the universal.
Tamar Dresdner