A single ear of corn is bound to the wall; a dry leaf or two are set side by side; a pine cone is placed like a butterfly, impaled to felt in the museum drawers, where its species is catalogued and classified; a ball of red wool, which is physical and bleeding in the imagination, but sterile and neutralized in reality, like a sheep far away from its flock. Erez Aharon (b. 1974, Rishon LeZion, Israel; lives and works in Tel Aviv) brings the world to the studio through samples. He translates nature into specimens, confronting multiplicity in laboratory conditions.
The power of synecdoche lies in the role assigned to the viewer: when the small represents the large, the individual stands for the general, the part for the whole, the viewer's role is to fill the gap. The poet writes about the toes of his beloved, the reader assumes her appearance and enacts the features in her, which the poet ascribed to her toes.
These paintings by Aharon are the opposite of classic landscape paintings, such as those by Jacob van Ruisdael or John Constable—painting that simulates nature in its entirety: sky, trees, earth, wheat, and animals, and the viewer on the outside surrounding them with his omnipotent gaze; a manifestation of the West's long-lost faith in a gaze that has the power to swallow the world up and lend it meaning, turn it into a text, which may have been written by God or the universe, but is entirely legible to us.
Aharon works in an opposite manner. He begins with despair, with the inability to grasp the world, with the overwhelming, blinding catastrophe of abundance. He storms out and brings samples into the studio, somewhat reminiscent of those brought by Larry Abramson to his studio, although in a different context: less like forensic items, and more like the relics of saints. Less like evidence of a crime, more like post-apocalyptic remnants. In the silence of the studio, in its heterotopia, out of time and the world, Aharon is free to depict them with the traditional technique and patience of still life painters of past centuries. These specimens, however, refuse to be still life per se. They are like arrows pointing to the lost world outside the painting. In this sense, Aharon is a conceptual painter. The series, in which the red woolen thread is tied around nails, possibly alludes to Jesus's Via Dolorosa, possibly to Theseus and Ariadne (who gave Theseus a ball of red thread to help him find his way out of the labyrinth); possibly, and mainly, however, it is synecdoche: a small detail about the nature of the world, indicative of the whole. This is true of the ear of corn and Zionism; the withering leaf and the temporal dimension, the fire extinguisher (an image to which I relate in particular) and the burning reality around us. In each such synecdoche the viewer is asked to take an active part, to activate and play.
We encounter Aharon as a conceptual painter most clearly in the painting Michal, referring to painter Michal Na'aman. While for Na'aman the masking tape is a sheet for recording time, a skin that envelops the painting's flesh, scaffolding left behind, hiding the building forever, for Aharon these resume being linguistic signs. From Na'aman's overwhelming multiplicity he isolates a few. Under laboratory conditions he takes control of them, but now instead of concealing they reveal; instead of a shell, they form a surface, resembling the sound ) "מ" Michal), deconstructed into ) מיכל , bearing her name in Hebrew a Hebrew root denoting "can" as well as ) "יכל" of the Hebrew word for "who", mi) and "to contain"). Who can? Who will contain? We are welcome to read these syllables as we will, and the deconstructed name thus becomes a Na'aman-style riddle, but once again, not quite: like the ear of corn, the leaf, the pinecone, and the woolen thread, the riddle is sterilized of the obscure, wild, emotional, excessive context. It is presented to us cold and distilled, as a specimen. These samplings invite us to observe the whole under their aspect, to play the role of the field as a single ear of corn.
