The Baal Shem Tov (Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer), a seventeenth-century rabbinical visionary and founder of the Hassidic movement, “brought God down” from heaven to earth: the Divine, he argued, does not reside in a heavenly sanctuary, but is present in front of us, here and now, and dwells within the believer, in his every movement and thought. As he saw it, the manifestations of divine presence in this world mean that the deity has a dwelling down below, that is, an abode in the physical world.

The exhibition is divided into two worlds, upper and lower – the essential difference between them being the artist’s view of painting and of the world. The massive concrete wall at the entrance to the museum features an arrangement of paintings depicting a fantastic reality. These paintings appear to strive upwards, while the heavy concrete wall tries to pull them down. The tension between figuration and abstraction, spirituality and materiality, is evident in a web of links and associations with the theater, autobiographical experiences, legends, and more.

Ever since Azoulay began creating works depicting Matisse-like paper cutouts (2015), abstraction has entered his painting in a decisive and tangible manner, rendering his work a kind of aesthetic and conceptual collage that links the earthly and celestial worlds. The painted cutouts are like a dream-window onto the heritage and spirit of Matisse. At the same time, they are a painterly device by which Azoulay gives form and color to the subconscious. In a language of patches, shapes, colors, and endless movement, he takes on wings and breaks free of the ground, hovering above it.

In the inner space of the exhibition, the artist presents a world of earthly images that are located in a dwelling down below. These visions, rooted in Israeli reality and in the artists’ biography, serve as scaffolding for the construction of a dwelling on high.

Father (spiritual, divine, biographical), Law, Language, and Order – these are the intangible human notions that underpin these paintings, which deal with to the politics of color, undermine the conspiracy of painting, and express veiled social, political, and cultural critiques. The artist, who is present in almost all the paintings, is representative of the multi-layered, nuanced and contradictory Israeli subject.

Azoulay is well-aware of his ability to create a beautiful image effortlessly, to tell a story through a seductive and persuasive palette, and to employ painterly manipulations to create intimate eye contact with the viewer. He establishes a sense of trust with the viewer through seemingly simple compositions in which he plants small incendiary provocations that turn the painting’s surface into a minefield.

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