In recent years we have witnessed a crazy arms race of representational technologies against vision. Televisions have become so sharp that sometimes you have a hard time suspending the disbelief necessary to watch a movie: you simply see too well. You see that the room is a setting. That these are actors. Sometimes, it is not that we see too well, but that we see in a different way from what our vision has been adapted to in the processes of natural selection. For example, in a nature film, when you see the chameleon's tongue shoot out in slow motion and incredible close-up, enveloping the unfortunate dragonfly that is sucked back into its mouth—this is an event we were not supposed to see. It is too small, too hidden, too fast. (I still remember my first time on a plane, when I saw the clouds from above, and thought, as a youth, that we were not meant to see the clouds from above).
But there is something misleading about this hyper-vision, about the bright sharpness of the colors, since it is concerned with how things are, not how they look to us, and hence it is limited to the existent, while human vision thrives in the void. Hence the pleasure of watching an old home movie of poor quality, hence the recent trend of listening to vinyl records once again. We long for an image that has a hint, a stutter, a scratch, a slit; a crack through which our subjectivity can participate in its construction. This is also the connection between vision and prophecy. The prophet does not see what is in front of him, he foresees the future. Seer in the Bible is synonymous with prophet. In the Greek world, the prophet is blind because he does not see with his eyes, but rather with his mind's eye.
Maya Cohen Levy (b. 1955, Tel Aviv; lives and works in Tel Aviv) paints an urban landscape—often one in which the power centers of Israeliness are reflected; often one tied to political questions. (The history of landscape painting is imbued with the political, because "landscape" is a word behind which lies another word: territory; and territory always belongs to someone). It is not a hyper-realistic landscape which subjugates the eye to the new master of mechanical representation, the one that Robert Hughes called the Thousand Year Reich of the photographic image, nor an Impressionistic landscape, which shifts visibility to the experience, emphasizing the ephemerality of the moment, the light, and the air.
No, because this is van Gogh on LSD. It is the vision of electric, electromagnetic, political, social power fields. A visual manifestation of what the word "landscape" hides. Perhaps, if we allow the airplanes' ghosts to lead the association, it is also a visionwhich somewhat prophesies 9/11.
There are painters in contemporary painting who have such electrical vision. Peter Doig, Daniel Richter. They transpire very close to the realms of abstraction. They cross the threshold of visibility and discover the visual wealth in painting power fields. Cohen Levy is close to them, but more local, more ascetic, more organized. Her color palette is strict and meticulous. That which does not emit vitality is blackened into a silhouette. There's something of Mordechai Ardon about her. She is local, and yet, this is the only landscape painting in Israeli art whose temperature is high, which is hot. Even in this sense, unfortunately, it is probably prophetic.
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