Sep. 24, 2005 - March 18, 2006
Six Feet Under, 2005, installation
In Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990), Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion (1982) and Carlos Saura’s Goya in Bordeaux (1999), paintings come alive: Vincent van Gogh’s The Langlois Bridge, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, Eugène Delacroix’s Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, and Francisco Goya’s The 3rd of May 1808.
Elhasid and Mandelblit offer the viewer the experience of “walking into a painting,” an experience of beauty and nightmare, in a sculptural installation hung from the ceiling, filling the museum’s central hall. In the current work Elhasid and Mandelblit continue exploring the tension between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, the voluminous and the flat, painting and sculpture, concrete and imaginary, virtual and real, “authentic” and “artistic”.
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Six Feet Under, a three-dimensional landscape scene that floats in space like a fantasy of magic and horror, consists of flat and voluminous sections revealed to the viewer upon entering the large hall. Like the American TV series from which the title of the installation was borrowed, Elhasid and Mandelblit’s space is replete with comments at once macabre and quasi-naive: a multi-branched tree deconstructed into its constituent elements once it is approached; large Perspex plates in twilight hues and a pattern of clouds and smoke; sleeping creatures hovering on a balloon with eyes shut, carrying their young or prey in their mouths; a projection of an animal’s silhouette, some wolf-dog with a dead bird in its mouth, moving like a ghost trapped in the landscape, appearing and disappearing like the Hound of the Baskervilles; a moon-smile emanating from between the tree branches and the clouds, large and evil like the Cheshire Cat’s grin.
Elhasid and Mandelblit’s landscape scene hovers between heaven and earth, misleading like a landscape illusion, at times fantastical at others nightmarish.
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