Group Exhibition · Guy Levy, Rachel Lavian, Neta Rabinovitch · Alfred Gallery, Tel Aviv · Curator: Dr. Revital Meshaly · 2024

A door or a gate is always an invitation to choose a possibility other than the present one. Standing before the door allows those on the threshold to hold two extremes for a moment: the security surrounding the familiar and the known on one side, and the excitement and enchantment that accompany the thought of a new and wondrous world, glimpsed on the other.

In the group exhibition The Door in the Wall, artists Rachel Lavian, Guy Levy and Neta Rabinovitch present paintings, drawings and sculptural installations concerned with thresholds and transitions. Their works act as a symbolic gateway, connecting physical and mental spaces alike. All the works in the gallery attest to a subtle moment that captures a transition, emphasizing the stretching of the split second in which a change occurs. This brief moment of metamorphosis embraces physical and material reality, logical thought about it, and a fantasy of imagined spaces enveloped in the spark of becoming and creation.

When Lavian enters the studio, she has a precise plan and structured drawings, yet she always gives herself over to the properties of the material and is drawn into its particular, unique character. Thus, the material and the object formed from it are present by turns: each time one is revealed, the other disappears. These changes and exchanges find expression in her sculptural installations, such as a wooden surface transformed into a brick wall through delicate markings, or a surface made of strips of fabric that covers the gallery's stage, turning it into a patchwork quilt.

Levy draws his inspiration from Eastern and Persian miniatures. In his paintings, an aesthetic formula into which mythological content is poured is emptied of its associations with time and place. It remains a vessel into which Levy pours different emotional and psychological content in each painting. Levy distills the images he works with into a figurative-symbolic pattern that returns again and again in his monochromatic blue paintings, yet he realizes this pattern in an original way each time.

Through material means, Rabinovitch captures cosmic moments of flickering and change, like light peeking through a curtain and illuminating the room, and a changing source of light. Her painstaking, detailed drawings emphasize the duration of the drawing process, stretching the moment in which a collection of lines or dots becomes an object and fades away.

For all three artists, the magic of creation is infused with an emphasis on the materiality present and on the action woven over and within it. Together, they invite viewers to stand on the threshold of their worlds and move between thinking and looking, between gazing and looking more closely, between idea and material. Visitors are invited to play with the possibility of opening a door to another world, or simply to gaze at it.