Jan. 7, 2006 - March 18, 2006
I’m, Botany, 2005, paintings
Jossef Krispel’s use of vast, inexhaustible expanses of images extracted from encyclopedias, newspapers and books, and his engagement with image-painting relationship, continues in the current series of paintings, I’m, Botany, where he draws his images from an Eretz-Israel plant guide. His paintings trace the aesthetics of the guide’s pages, attempting to redefine it through the fluid language of painting, corresponding with botanical and anatomical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. Krispel avoids direct observation of nature, instead shifting the gaze toward a copied image, thus transforming the plant guide into a secondary source, a type of mediator between nature and the painting, an alternative to nature itself.
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The vegetal images are painted on large-scale yellow canvases; their gray color drips downward, staining the canvas and generating signs of life and quivering in them. Krispel explores the mute language of nature, as presented in the guide, juxtaposing it with the mute, nonobsequious language of painting. The plants are described as interrupted signs in uniform monochromatic hue, and as discrete elements taken out of their natural context; at the same time, the fluid brush strokes and the warm yellow background seem to awaken the painting from its frozen state, helping it overcome its muteness. The “hand-work” incorporated in the series likewise addresses a type of harsh, mute language which generates signs and corresponds with both the language of flora and the language of painting. Krispel confronts these languages in an attempt to facilitate a dialogue between them, to bring them together and redefine them.
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