Oren Eliav:
They’ll Never Wake Us In Time

In Oren Eliav’s paintings, the images perform – they present themselves to an audience. Architectural elements (a highly decorated altarpiece, an ornate ceiling), objects and clothing (a cape, a helmet, a bell), or figures whose essential mode is the act of performing (musicians, orators, or royalty) – all manifest to the viewer in a startling abundance. In Eliav’s painting, these images are hollow containers whose presence is established through their own elaborate surfaces.

Eliav’s painting first follows the images and then itself. It works from up close and from within – proximity that no longer allows for the sight to rely on reason. Thus, despite their highly detailed depiction, approaching the paintings neither reveals the image’s components nor sharpens the gaze. Rather, the approach unfolds as a decomposing movement – we are faced with lines and drips, whirlings, and scattered smudges. It is in those moments when painting traces ornamentation, that it strips itself of decorum and exposes the simple, concrete facts of the painterly craft. These moments also entail the failure of vision as a structuring and organizing faculty or as a metaphor for the order of things or a worldview. Instead, vision re-establishes itself as a basic, corporeal, and tangible sense, now mixed with other senses such as hearing and touch.