Khen Shish – “Handmade Bombs” (20.2 – 29.3)

Khen Shish, 2014, acrylic on paper,410x420 cm“In order to create disorder in the painting you have to disrupt, interrupt, or maim. tear, perforate. As with a simple walk on the pavement in daily life, it’s the same with painting. There’s room for injuries. The dilemma is whether to ‘dress’ it or let it ‘form a scab’” (Khen Shish).

 

The joy of painting, the physical pleasure of making it, the mental freedom and the bodily liberation… And on the other hand – the compulsion to turn up each morning in front of the empty canvas or paper and start the ritual of knocking on the white walls; that ritual of wooing the gate of the naked painting until it submits to the first brush stroke, which expands and collects into a stain as smudged and as borderless as if it, the stain, were only the form’s ghost; perhaps the painting will submit to the flight of a line that takes off, carves, scratches or falls to pieces in the space of the picture, as if trying to write in some idiosyncratic language.

Khen Shish  2014,acryiic on paper, 107x72 cmThis act of painting generates a variety of choreographies and gestures, including hurling, pulling, spraying, and dripping, taking the canvas down from the wall and placing it on the floor, bending on all fours and smearing paint with the fingers and so on. The painting evolves through an energetic expressiveness detached from any reality. Shapes, layers, covering, scraping, intersecting lines, tensions and balances – and here she is, Khen Shish, at the heart of an adventure.

With no plan, no preparatory drawings, no representational intentions, no figurative vision and no indication of indecisions: open to surprises, they play the painting, embellishing the melody with noises, crashes, rhythmic repetitions, spontaneous deviations, pauses, breaths, meditation and improvisation. The process is the subject of art itself and the painting is a miracle, she would conclude, without cynicism or irony.

Text by Naomi Aviv — 2010

 

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