Arnon Ben-David: The Sorrowful Way

Ben-David's journey of initiation shifts between various schools (Ahad Ha'am Elementary, Avni Institute, the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design) and the interpersonal space where the artist converses with his teachers and colleagues. The works and their modes of presentation on the gallery walls convey artistic and ethical lessons passed on to the artist over the years, which he now hands down to the next generation.

An early formative moment marking the beginning of work on the exhibition was the recollection of a visit to the Israeli art exhibition at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in 1965 and the encounter with Igael Tumarkin's then-radical piece, Panic over Trousers. The light that fell on the work and its affinities with an adjacent work by Michael Gross left a strong impression on the young Ben-David, and their imprint would reincarnate years later in a midrash about assemblage and the tendency of life materials and found objects to challenge the boundaries of the format in his oeuvre. In this vein, the exhibition is a single, multi-organed work that summons complex images from the past. The reconstruction of the space and the light falling on the objects is aimed primarily at the very act of remembering, in an attempt to capture the abstract essence of things via parallel routes of drawing, painting, photography, and writing.

Ben-David paints in oil on canvas, creating detailed, saturated alliterations. The chiaroscuro painting, in its tachist and linear manifestations, gradually structures the memory etched in the mind. The use of photography is a conceptual choice bound up with the exhibition's point of departure, relating to moments in which there was no photographic involvement. Thus, the photographs in the exhibition, embedded in the fabric of remembrance, are not a "reliable" document perpetuating a place or a figure from the past, but rather a "trigger" for the viewer's memory bank, which is rooted in space and time. The text works are another medium of reconstruction accompanying the viewing process, which sheds light on the work's contexts. the return of the seasoned artist to echoes of his past and origins brings to mind the literary theme of nostos (return, homecoming)—a physical and spiritual return unfolding in the exhibition as an inquiry into the nature of art, exploring how a person becomes the artist he is.