Shva Salhoov
Unraveling
Mosh Kashi’s accumulating body of works embodies with spine-tingling clarity the total overlap of the two mythical, psychological, dimensions of culture: his work exposes to what extent the realm of discontentment in culture and of the realm of cultural contentment are one. Their fusion into a single compressed and ambiguous entity is achieved through his spectacular mastery of painting, as he harnesses his honing of the act of painting to the iconographic thematics that distinctively characterizes his plastic world. Mosh Kashi paints marvelously. The marvel, however, is wholly invested in the creation of deserted, marginal, abandoned expanses. There, at the edges of the desolation, live moments of revelation of a reality that has no other place apart from the painted canvas. These are paintings that in the strictest way possible materialize the Renaissance conception of art as the highest and most distinguished sphere of culture – as the acme of the humanist project of a designed creation of the new man, the man of reason, of the reason that contemplates itself in the mirror of painting, the spiritual and magical power of which the humanists redefined as harnessed to the creating and the constituting of a consciousness that improves itself in its image. The return to these regions of the beginnings of modernism, to the already-scholastic remnants and through to the end of the Renaissance sublime, embodies a profound and sovereign internalization of the paradigm that I can refer to only as the Duchampian paradigm – for it was Duchamp’s words that became the declaration of the death of art.
This is painting after the death of painting, art after the death of art, performed with an acerbic and burning awareness of the question of the truth-condition of a work that possesses real, topical and alert artistic validity. This alertness constitutes the painting that it engenders and materializes as a painting that follows, comes after, the shock and the muteness decreed by Duchamp’s great theory. Every canvas that Kashi paints formulates a possibility of evading the paralyzing gaze of Medusa, her eyes wide open in Duchamp’s demand for an act of creation that is entirely spiritual, in which painting with all of its means is only a tool, a preliminary instrument for the achievement of that unbounded spiritual liberty which no material can capture or embody.
In Kashi’s work the extrication from that paralysis is accomplished (as noted above) as a return backwards – a return to painting by means of a committed intellectual and impulse-driven return to the roots of modernism, to the space that is still contained in the Renaissance ethos. Especially important for the appreciation of Kashi’s work is the way Rembrandt shaped the signs of the shadow and of otherness of the new era, the Renaissance. It should be stressed that in this return to early modernism Kashi has responded to an option that may have been silenced or suppressed, although it is already present in these words by Duchamp: “I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind. […] In fact, until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious: it had all been at the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little during the last century.”[1]
It seems to me that Duchamp’s absolute rejection of the plastic modernisms of his period, as expressed in these words, has so far not received adequate emphasis, and that his call for a return to a spiritual and even religious conception of art has not really been heard.
This silenced call, the deferred and pulsing mechanism stored in those words of his – the return to painting in Mosh Kashi’s work seems to embody a conscious response to this very option. At the same time, the return to painting is essentially a return to a lost spirit whose return occurs in a zone that is paradigmatically designated as a zone of danger – as the zone of the violation of a father’s commandment, a commandment that decrees a strict and endlessly transgressible prohibition – this is the zone that presents itself as a site of a crime always-already committed – for when are the conditions for the materialization of art as a pure spirituality really possible at all?
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The central icon in Kashi’s body of works – the crown of twigs – gropes through all its changing metamorphoses for the possibility of the spiritualization and nullification of the body. His choice of an attribute that embodies a bitter, murderous, irony – the crown of thorns that was used to crown “the king of the Jews” on his via dolorosa to his death on the Cross – is a choice that constitutes the marginal signifier as the focus of the painting. This is a double displacement or shift that recurs in all the paintings of twigs that he has created – the falling crown, already and always knocked down, represents an already completed deed of rejection and murder. But the victim will never materialize again as a figure, as a body. The remnant, the condemning evidence, the missing trace, is what continues, metamorphosing, spreading, spreading to increasingly greater dimensions, severing itself from place, from time, from story – turning into something entirely different than that rejected passion – into a history without a story – without a hero – into a reality all the power and realness of which is only in the painting. Painting that captures the gaze with the sharp, misty, delicacy of the tangles, interwoven warp-and-woof, of obstacles that block the spreading of the gaze, setting it a rhythm and a tempo of quick peeks through more and more of the same obstacle – one cannot hold the gaze for long – the tangle returns and breaks it – smashes it – and delights it in a way that suddenly wakes you – like waking up, suddenly.
That sudden awakening which the painting sets off shapes itself into a sober insight about the deep limits of the possibility of return – the tangle is a span that has been shifted from its traditional position in the depth of the painting, where it functions as a background, as anonymous décor, to the painting’s foreground – but this shift embodies an incomplete transformation, because now that it is both the foreground and the depth, it is no longer another boundary that also embodies a horizon that harbors a promise and a secret, the promise and the secret of the “beyond” – the tangle that has become a foreground is a line of a final boundary – beyond it there is nothing at all.
The transformation of the background into the focus – of the marginal into an icon executed with a painterly power that accords it an impressive, melodramatic, aura of chiaroscuro, is a major means in the neutralization of the painting’s mimetic dimension. The twigs, the thorns, the tangle, break apart at the demands of a memory that carries the signs of the real world or the “landscape” – the quasi-monochrome coloring, too, blurs and almost erases the natural, organic, source of these materials. They do not grow “there”, in the world of things, and they are represented “here”, on the canvas. The realm of their creation and their materialization is painting.
From this ontology, like an echo, like a vapor that grows thicker, there stems an epistemology – a state of mind that is almost uncomfortably, almost distressingly aware of the strong, and very material, presence of the painting. But this strong materialization, which it is so rare to encounter again in paintings of the present time, posits and exposes the painting as something other, as a thing whose otherness is the very fact of its differentiating itself as an object that is for itself; and in this otherness, in this selfhood, it sinks itself and is absorbed into the gaze that is opposite it – exposed and bared as a foreignness that is present and for which there is no substitute: any reproduction must miss the present reality of the tangle that is not green, and is not gray, that is not a hiding-place and has no in-front or behind. The touch of the reminiscence of the organic, the natural, the glinting of the greenness of a forest clearing, is a ghostly echo of something that is nothing but the past at the height of its evaporation. And the new, the present, has not yet appeared and perhaps will never reveal itself.
The erasure and the distancing of the mimetic signifiers from these paintings – by means of the choice of coloring that refers to the anti-mimetic textures of black-and-white photography, which points up the fact that this painting is painting that comes after the awareness of photography, as what is always-already after the fact of plastic shaping of the real – this ghostly coloring, then, which does not expose any photographed source and indeed is not based on anything other than the pure and at the same time denied painterly gesture, erases and obviates not only the natural possibility of landscape, or a view of a real, specific place: all the transformative power of the paint is invested in the erasure of any distinguishable historicity and, as a corollary, of any realistic politicality, which is always bound up with the distinctive signifiers of historicity.
This is painting which, in its movement from the real towards its abstraction, seeks to shed from itself any identity, or identifiable locality and, while totally shedding all the signs of identity – sexual, ethnic, national, religious – to silence all political struggle and criticism. This painting’s absolute rejection of the political sentences it to occur as a differentiated site of hard silence – silencing and silent: there is no crack in this perfect envelope of silentness.
The creation of these screens of continuing silentness entails a fantastic actualization of the archaic, alchemical, special power of oil paint: the crystalline homogeneity of the oil, that gleams like a foreign radiance, cool and distancing, is used for the creation of a unitive painterly world, the unfertilized, sterile unity of which demands and constitutes an impenetrable boundary that delineates for itself a shuttered space of existence and presence. At the same time, the very shuttered appearance of the painted canvas seems to attest, in its sealed silentness, to the ever-increasing horror of the conflicted, agitating heterogeneity of the historical reality in which it was created – a reality which Kashi firmly, severely, refuses to serve as a witness and documenter.
The tragic, melancholic, character of this stubborn and absolute refusal engenders a resistance that does not let go, and does not become reconciled. Its presence stays and is absorbed as the shadow of the final sounds of an anonymous requiem stay and remain – in the after-image, in the space of its nullification that contracts and closes.
* * *
And in the span marked out by the interweaving emergence of severed branches, the space of consciousness is held in a vise of constantly intensifying beauty – a mourning beauty that allows a very prolonged sojourn in a transitional space the entire essence of which is occlusion.
This vise of beauty is made possible by the unsettling honing of an incomparably delicate and complex composition of thin planes that again and again create the effect of shallowness and prevent the illusion of depth, of perspective, of a hiding-place, of a passage. No, there is no passage.
The strict consistency with which, for fifteen years now, Kashi has honed his images of the crown of thorns – the persisting power of the transformation that effects ever-new change and complexity in them – draws its distinctive painterly logic from the Renaissance principle that was revealed in all its power in Rembrandt’s paintings. This is essentially a hermeneutic principle, which embodies a radical and absolutely sovereign interpretative actualization of “the source” – the holy scriptures. By using this interpretative principle, Rembrandt plucks out a moment, a fragment of a moment, from the margins of the sanctified scenes and endows it with the full power of the painter, the creator, in order to create it anew.
This activation of the principle of “rebirth”, which is the “Renaissance” – constitutes the human essence anew in an affinity with the canonical that is revealed in all the depths of its humanity. Suffice it to recall the strange, forever enigmatic, sight of the naked Bath-Sheba, sitting on the edge of an unmade bed, King David’s letter almost falling from her fingers, while her maid, or her mother, bathes her toes. Bath-Sheba’s gaze sees nothing – she is held in a quietness that becomes more and compressed – her lost gaze makes the viewer’s gaze drop down to the letter, down to her feet, to her toes, toward nothing.
This gaze that wanders, again and again abandoning something that is wholly abandoned – not hoping, not taut, but at the same time already at the height of a decreeing of an absolute change – is the same gaze that is made to rise and to drop by the expanses of thin tangle that Kashi creates. This is a fragmented searching after some past or some “nature” embodying an already vanished source, and before and after the emergence and the revelation of the thing that decreed that past’s end. The space of the span that is in-between – that is after and before – announces itself as an absolute space, always metonymic, which is to say partial, always the margins of a meta-narrative, always an edge whose adjacency to the focus that has vanished like an absent body – like a hidden face – attests to a disaster or to a sacrifice that has already happened, after which a voided universe reveals itself. The crown of thorns, which is recreated anew in endless variations, repels and unravels the hermetic narrative of the mystery of “the prodigal son”. His travels, his being lost to his father, and most importantly his redemption, implicit in his return to his father and his home, emerge and then sink in the movement of the meticulous interweaving of tangle that forever promises and disappoints its redeemed unraveling.
Actually, the power of this body of works draws its increasingly growing strength from a paradoxical dynamics which, at the same time as it increasingly interweaves and thickens the tangled textures of the crown of thorns, also unravels and releases it from the bonds that imprison it within the closed bounds of the sacred narrative and its accepted meanings.
The loss, the passion, the mystery – which are unraveled in the space allotted them by Kashi’s paintings – constitute the journey as a movement of mind that has no end: such are the paintings of the black fields that thin the archaic night with a kind of poisonous and deceptive electric radiation; such is the artificial sunset that screens a sea whose mythical sacredness has evaporated and gone – and all its waves unite into a wave that overturns in a halted and completed retreat from the possibility of a shore.
The rhythm of these fragmented regions accompanies the most solitary journey that the art that is born after its death teaches the mind to once again devote itself to – to learn the path of the transformation that is always occurring here, very nearby. Such is this sea, or the field, or the tangle of naked branches. These attest to the hesitant proximity of the possibility born of standing alone in the knowledge of the darkening hour, the hour after the absolute loss of the possibilities of shelter.
Translated from the Hebrew by Richard Flantz
[1] Quoted in Arturo Schwarz, “Marcel Duchamp: The Large Glass and Related Works”, in Marcel Duchamp: To and From The Large Glass, ed. Arturo Schwarz and Mordechai Omer; English editing by Richard Flantz (Tel Aviv: The Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, Tel Aviv University, 1994, p. 17).
Ruthi Ofek
Infinite Painterly Landscapes
Mosh Kashi’s studio is located in southern Tel Aviv, on a street where old houses from the city’s beginnings are a stone’s throw from modern multi-story buildings. In an old house intended for demolition, in an apartment where plaster chunks fall from the ceiling—this is where Kashi creates his paintings. The studio is tantamount to an “enclave of place and time” ostensibly cut off from the rhythm of life outside. His paintings appear diametrically opposed to the environment in which they are made. The building’s cracked walls separate the tumult of the city from the space of creation.
It is from the physical wretchedness of the urban interior still surrendering its past glory that Kashi’s paintings are spawned, paintings centered on natural images. Thus, for example, a vacant lot, a fallow field, extends from side to side across the painterly format, without beginning or end. The field exerts a mighty presence, saturated and compressed, almost Baroque in nature, suggesting the possibility that place halts time, that it is timeless and placeless, that it is, in fact, no place and all places. The observing eye wanders from side to side, finding no single foothold onto which to cling. Originating in reality, the landscape seems to pull the gaze time and again, connecting to a memory of reality which becomes imaginary.
Kashi’s virtuous work mode misleads the viewer, conveying the feeling that he has already seen that field before, traversed this landscape, or observed this boundless space before. By means of the colors on the canvas and the chiaroscural effects, Kashi documents an imaginary-realistic landscape. His painting is not landscape painting, but rather a painterly landscape which inspires a magical illusion of infinite expanses, of depth which draws the viewer into a whirlpool of color, at times in vivid hues of red, yellow, and black, at others—in shades of green and gold. Furthermore, the coloration embeds traces of movement and speed beyond mere area covering. These painterly qualities reveal an added dimension which often eludes the viewer, like the exposure of an inner layer of the painting before its final covering.
Kashi’s works demand active, prolonged observation to gradually decipher the painter’s interpretation of the subject. Like Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, the works dictate the time they require. Each work invites the viewer to set an inner clock while observing it. The slow viewing process also contains an element of surprise: only then are the works’ enigmas and strata laid bare, and this is the secret of their appeal. Kashi’s works invoke contemplations; they raise doubts and quandaries, without providing answers. They strive to sharpen attention, to indicate the possibilities of the gaze, to unravel thought without stitching it together again.
Making innovative, fascinating use of traditional painting techniques, Kashi does not give up the act of painting, but his work draws on insights which derive from the experience and thinking of modern and contemporary art. The poetic and metaphorical value carried by the painting alludes, on the one hand, to Mark Rothko’s color fields, and on the other—to Gerhard Richter’s work. The painting is thus charged with layers of time and place beyond the here-and-now.
Kashi’s works are not created as discrete paintings, but rather as series (among them “Fields,” “Nocturno,” “Cronos”). Each painting stands in its own right, but the series as a whole contains a slow, studious development of the theme. These may be variations on a theme, as in music, or an attempt to realize the same thing again, thereby lending it an inkling of the time that passed between one work and another. This work mode enables Kashi close scrutiny, analysis, and precision. Each work in the series has a sequel. The series meets us at different points in time. The languages of the works in the series are not identical, but rather variants; the sentence is the same sentence, but the syntax is slightly different.
The golden balls presented in the exhibition are like an added riddle to the enigma of painting. The golden ball rolls into the world with majestic perfection, carrying a reflection of an entire universe, sucking the space therein. It seems as though it is not the ball that is rolling in the world, but rather the entire world which is rolling inside the ball. The balls contain something by virtue of their very capacity to contain. The intersection of the simple form and the gold is an encounter of two fundamental elements in Kashi’s oeuvre. On the one hand, simplicity; on the other hand, sophistication resulting from the form and matter; sharp reduction of color alongside internal richness; great darkness juxtaposed with gentle light, like a pearl glowing in the space.
