ON THE FABRIC OF HORIZON IN THE PAINTINGS OF NIMROD KOREN FROM THE CATALOGUE ACCOMPANYING AN EXHIBITION AT THE ARTIST'S RESIDENCE GALLERY, HERZLIYA, 2002

 

Peter Lievaart

 

Anticipating and sensing the fully exposed propinquity of a particular light and space in the exhibited paintings of Nimrod Koren, I am quite tempted to think that it didn't come out of the proverbial blue but heralded itself, even before he moved to Tel Aviv (1997), in the larger and darker canvases of the early- and mid-1990's painted in Amsterdam. There, at his studio in a former school building on the Kanaalstraat, several paintings had hung side by side for weeks on end, on the 20feet high walls, showing their obvious thematic and chromatic similarities. Painted in layers, devoid of figural ambition and often 'open ended', the search for meaning and form was unmistaken in these canvases, as was the sheer awe inspired by the act of painting itself. But in some unlookedfor pictorial details and niches (Koren himself being one of his own more experienced and critical spectators) certain spectral and textural features emerged. Every time two colours met or overlapped, tangible edges came into being, seemingly made of a texture that was utterly different from the rest of the canvas. These tiny horizons, as I would like to call them, overwhelmed with hoped for but unforeseen authenticity and necessity. In retrospect, therefore, witnessing the paintings exhibited here, the eventual move to Tel Aviv appears to have been inevitable du moment painting entered Koren's life.

 

Now, if that sounds too much like a natural born artist story, so it is. Because fortunately enough, this painter suffers far more from a craving for the infinite than being a (self)conscious designer of a particular there-was-no-other-way pictography. In the choice of colour, the density of the paint, the way two monochromes meet(sometimes even mate), and the almost hysterical transparancy of the technical choices made, the canvases harbour such a deliberate frequency of small ruptures, spectral noises and Newmanesque (humanesque?) pseudo-abstractions that the paintings, at first sight appearing to be introverted, almost autistic, on closer inspection actually vibrate and flicker with an unexpected intensity. Bewildered by and yet at home in his own innate 'un-placeness', Koren's work testifies, whether explicitly or not, to that great natural phenomenon of being a longing at the same time: the horizon.

 

However, compared to the earlier mentioned Amsterdam canvases, the paintings exhibited here no longer mortgage extra square feet in order to express space. Trained by the brightness of the middle East's sharp celestial and terrestrial contours these smaller canvases need little room to make their move- hence, enter light, enter the horizon, as they take on almost threshold-like properties, gazing out perhaps on either the Hebraic 'tehom' or on the gazing out itself. Add to this the recently adopted, egg-shaped, Gostanian, almost mocking, ovals, and some of these paintings suggest a looking back at the onlooker and, for that matter, at the painter himself. At the same time( and the simultaneity no longer seems coincidental), this Ur-kopf brutally censures inches of what has suddenly become delicate and possibly vital horizon. Small wonder, then, the artist has introduced a house here and there, for in such vistas hearing a primeval giggle is a near thing.

 

And yet, these paintings comfort without promoting nostalgia or self-pity. How? My guess is that the rhetoric of duality, which substantiates the earlier canvases, has literally made room for a singular trust in being in between (as exemplified by the concept of horizon). The exhibited work shelters an undeniable metaphysical luminosity, which reflects not so much a knowledge of but a familiarity with Hebraic mysticism and its extensive and complex exegesis on beginnings, thresholds, and first things.Within such a neighbourhood, the paintings are not exclusively symptoms of Koren's imaginative essence, but are also vivid realities in themselves, combining the enduring osmosis between longing and the already achieved.