Mosh Kashi, a senior lecturer at Bezalel, lives and works in Tel Aviv. He has significantly exhibited in Israel and abroad and won the Minister of Education Art Award (2004), the Artistic Encouragement (1997), and the Young Artist Award (1994). His works can be found in important private and public collections such as The Israel Museum, the Haifa Museum, the Open Museum in Tefen, and more.
Mosh Kashi’s pictorial research extends for more than two decades and is characterized by precise and meticulous painting works in thin layers of oil paints laid on top of each other. In this exhibition, the nature and landscape consciousness of nature as memory is sharpened and a value that has no particular place or time. The gallery will display works of exposed spaces, paintings of light and dark fields in constant motion, horizons that stretch from end to end and are painted on the verge of abstraction, and alongside them, works of ferns in sharp color reduction. The conception of the works as NON PLACES, as a place that is no-place and nowhere, but is also all places, allows a look at Kashi’s pictorial position in recent years, which assumes that the innocent view of a place, of the wildness and primacy of a landscape, will always be loaded with the recognition and consciousness of its creator, and of course with the mindset of the observer.
Time seems to stand still, and the viewer is sucked into a bubble in time, into a reality that is a kind of vague memory imprinted within him, into the infinite spatial depth of the pictorial space. Mosh Kashi’s paintings are poetic and meditative, inviting to contemplate and sharpen attention and gaze. The paintings resonate with Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic sublime paintings, Mark Rothko’s color fields paintings, and Gerhard Richter’s sky and landscape paintings. Along with the romance and sublimity of these landscapes, and with their quiet and profound beauty, they also embody a reversal in the choice of place, which is not unusual and astonishing, but representative, as it was well described by Shva Salhoov:
“Abandoned, marginal, neglected space … A revelation of reality, which has no place other than the painted canvas... Those twigs, thorns, or thicket lose the sense of actual reality, the landscape; they do not grow “there” in the world of things and are represented “here” on the canvas. The space of their formation and realization is the painting. ” (Shva Salhoov, 2012)
Mosh Kashi’s place turns from the real towards the abstraction, shedding any sign of identity, localism, or politicalness. In doing so, he turns his back on contemporary painting and is characterized by a unique pictorial creation that does not pursue dominant fashions. The distant background in the landscape paintings becomes the focus of interest. The marginal and neglected, like those twigs or thorns, move to the stage front and are executed with a picturesque intensity that gives the image a sacred pathos saturated aura. Mosh recreates a magical and glorious reality, existing and dissipating simultaneously, on which an infinite silence is cast.
* The works are courtesy of Noga Gallery
