In the exhibition,‘Islands of Beats’, the mechanism of nature’s infinite cyclical continuity resonates. At the same time, there are temporary representations that man’s hand quickly builds. Like an attempt to connect rhythms of physical occurrences within which the dynamics are chaotic.
Bouca Grunfeld’s work is created from syllables parts, combinations, fragmented connectors, canvas pieces painted with liquid paint stains, collected branches and logs, corroded and crumbling rusty iron remnants, and other kinds of quirky “findings” she collected on her way. This syntax’s language leads to the modernist abstract, deals with stains of color and material, balances and throws out of balance, stretches longitudes or latitudes, produces constructions, and mentions a natural landscape versus an urban landscape.
It exists in the boundary between the flat and the three-dimensional, between floor work and a small-scaled sculptural-architectural model, between a picture and a shelf, between the interior and the exterior. Bouca Grunfeld takes the viewers on a journey between parts of implicit landscape views, between the natural and the industrial-mechanical, and leaves them in circles of wandering in search of meaning. The works hang on the wall and relate to the gallery space: to the window, door, lintel, and niche – they descend to the floor, slide to the panel and unfold at the feet of the viewer, who wanders between them while trying not to step on them.
Bouca Grunfeld, in essence, is a painter. During her studies at “Bezalel,” she built her own picture frames and painted on them. Already then, she created irregular-shaped picture frames, like an octagon and an arch, like American painter Frank Stella did. The painting was flat, but its presence made it an object. The one picture on the canvas did not satisfy her. The need for the material was always there; in its concrete presence, in combining and constructing, in the immediacy it brings, in the movement created by placing several elements in the space, in coincidence.
The works in the exhibition evoke a sense of transience and detachment, even survival. The “rafts,” built from an aggregate of wooden pieces that seem like a beam, cloth pieces as a tarp, a paint stain, and a rusty iron piece, produce an image of an improvised, plucked shelter, an initial replacement for the house. People do not exist in her work, but there is a presence of living environments, kinds of man-made constructions. The pieces look like they “float” on the gallery floor, like those paper boats that children sail on a puddle simulating a river. Their Zen tranquility allows for feelings. The empty space fills in the gaps; the absence, the incomplete part, leaves room for breathing; they are an opening for occurrence.
The restlessness, frenzy, and inconvenience of human existence led Bouca Grunfeld to engage in dismantling and destruction; in remnants and parts. The works’ parts, connected and unconnected simultaneously, laid down leaning, hanging, and sliding, simulate islands, remains, remnants, and parts. In the exhibition, they become beats of life.
