Moving in Forbidden Territory

Ora Abrahami's oil paintings contrive a personal mechanism for exploring the concealed and culling from what is discovered behind the screen. The goal of the search is not focused on an affirmative metaphysical essence, the kind which creates a world. The observing eye pinpoints elements which imprison, obstruct and entangle.

The pigment imitates the soil, the material, the country, projecting directly onto journeys into the bowels of the earth. There is no differentiation between an embryonic lump, new life in the process of forming, and a metaphoric corpse in shrouds being absorbed by Mother Earth.

Moving in forbidden territory is permitted the sorcerer and shaman for the sake of catharsis, purification, release from the shadows of the other world.

Coming up against the experience of breaking free, of dividing up, of turning something complete into a multiplicity -is comparable to a close acquaintance with the nature of loss.

The way is marked by blobs of raw material, self-enclosing circles, knotted ends which weave ensnaring webs, like recurring patterns.

The window motif reappears from different aspects: the passage from in to out gets blurred, the border between life and nothingness is hazy. Cold, dirty-blue skies are fixed behind a bar of resolutely irrational strokes.

A feeling of tension derives from the desire to undermine distinctions, be seduced and jump into the bottomless pit.

Daring to wander in forbidden fields, even if only in the imagination, self-control and the ability to return from the netherworld: these confer an afterlife. Life in the image of endless growth, both that which is enveloped in gravestones and that which springs forth from the earth's navel.

In the vortex of flowers mixing the live with the dead, bubbles a creative force which has confronted a barrier and burst through.

Dorit Kedar
Art critic of "Al Hamishmar" (The Guardian),
Art Editor of "Muses",
Brochure of the Art Teachers School, Beit Berl,
Art Lecturer, Tel-Aviv University, Extra Mural Department.

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