As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, the pure color, as a stain or a surface, has been meant to be the cornerstone of a new international language: “The Language of Form and Color,” as Wassily Kandinsky termed it in the sixth section of his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Abstract artists such as Kandinsky came to prove that a surface covered with colors, which has abandoned any readable affinity to nature, would be left, after all, readable.2
Reshef brings nature into her paintings. The figuration at which she hints (hair, particles, cells, molecules, thorns) brings the cosmic and molecular nature into the abstract. Be it the enlarged microscopic image implied in the series Life Forms I, II, III (2006) and in Hovering (2008) where color cells sail and meet; or the suggestive landscape in Wonder Tree (2006) and Sprouts (2007), where among the stains and shapes a foliage, a tree trunk, and branches can be discerned; or the telescopic image suggested in Sparks (2008) and Clouds (2008), where the stains receive a cosmic haze – the shapes in the painting have meaning as content. Reshef’s works widen the sight beyond the viewing techniques of photography, telescopes and microscopes. They suggest something that is beyond our familiarity with the world. By doing this they expand our sight.
Most of the paintings are created when Reshef dampens the canvas. Sometimes she will drench the whole canvas, and at times only the areas where the future image will be created. The primary dilution of the paint is done in jars, but the second is done directly on the canvas – the diluted paint comes across the damp surface in different techniques and gestures; at times strokes, at times in drips, by sprinkling, or spraying it with the brush. The constant action of dampening the canvas turns Reshef’s painting into a sculpture; Reshef wets the canvas whenever it dries – the same manner as working with plaster. Thus she sculpts the colors into the canvas. Reshef finds ways of coupling the liquid color with the half-liquid canvas. The practical aspects of the work are inseparable from its poetic ones; the connection and dissolution of color occur interdependently with the action of painting. In this process Reshef owns both the self-control and the spontaneous flow of color. The painting tends to step forward to the world of color. It needs to be chased, hastened, and then chased again. The work of painting is created in a sort of awe, meant to expand the potentialities of the canvas and colors. This process of control and release allows surprises and it is filled with the joy of discovery. The painting incessantly changes – each procedure creates a new and different result. The painting holds within it the twofold nature of something between spontaneity and master plan. The technique Reshef created and refined constantly alters the painting. The merging of colors and the fluid texture of the canvas; the different levels of absorption and expansion of paint, assimilation and blending of color; the filled spaces and the voids left exposed – all take part in creating the final piece. Thus, when exhibited, the painting is present as a constant event. Reshef’s painting is a document, an action, an event and a narrative. It documents an occurrence that happened around it and upon it in the artist’s studio, and it exists as a constant event of seeing. But the tension between the temporary and permanent in Reshef’s painting is not only part of the history of its working process, but is a part of their performance in space – for instance, in the motion created in In Statu Nascendi, Orange Celebration and in Bloom, and also in Life Forms III and Break Through (2008).
During the slow process of the painting’s creation, in the months in which Reshef lives with the paintings, making additions and modifications, even a portrait that became an abstract painting returns to being a portrait. While setting down more and more layers there is a need to decide when to stop – when exactly does the intensity of the color become a burden? It is in this trial that Reshef proves her skill. Just as a person who cannot play an instrument can recognize a note out of tune, the viewer recognize a painting that is burdensome, or out of balance. Reshef’s paintings are harmonious, in that they are played on tune; the brush drums on the canvas, the stains expand to a composition, each having its own melody – the organic images and the dots in Wonder Tree merge like a bow quartet accompanied by piano; the warm stains filling Finger Lakes (2007) tune in like bow and wind instruments at the beginning of a concert. To go on with the musical metaphor, one could say that Reshef’s paintings can be hummed.
The colors and forms created by the blind dazzling that occurs when staring at the sun with eyes shut constitute a gaze into the light and into the skin and subsequently into abstraction and into the body. In the still dark of the eye, the affect of the glittering light dims the relations between interior and exterior, and between abstraction and figuration. Reshef’s paintings are all sight and a desire to see. They were born in the bright blindness of staring directly at the sun with eyes shut. The drama that takes place in this stillness; the attempt of the eye within the eye to follow the spots of light within the darkness is carried on in Reshef’s canvas.
The abstraction in painting, which began with Impressionism, originates in the division of light and color, as Claude Monet’s works attest. If until Haystacks (1891) light and color were of one piece, then since Rouen Cathedral, West Façade, Sunlight (1894), light has been detached from color, the hand detached from the eye, and the real painter became the viewer5. The pivot of Reshef’s painting is light and color. Both alter and lead the eye to different places and both are there inside it. Reshef’s abstraction fixes the viewer as the one to link the elements, the one to follow the light of the image. Light projecting from the painting, for example in the cracks between the plates sailing upon Dancing in Tiptoes (2008) and the veins of Bloom – becomes a figure in Reshef’s painting.
The painting The Reef (2006) includes an image that suggests a reef of water plants – plantation is created through colors and forms and lots of light that seems to penetrate the reef. Like the plant, the painting is fed by light. At the core of Reshef’s work is the desire to see. It links color, which is the basis for form in her paintings, with light, which is the basis for seeing.
An image is like the Medusa. It wishes to freeze the viewer in front of it. In the society of spectacle it is customary that every visual product attempts to capture our attention and stun us to a halt and astonishment. It obligates you to forget in order to become its viewer. The viewer becomes a seer when the seen exceeds the image. Whereas the viewer remains passive in front of the image, the seer partakes in its creation. f abstract painting desires not to be a picture, it is this desire that links it to the viewer, and creates a seer7. In Reshef’s painting the question is what is the object – what is the stain and what is its contour? So, for example, in Dancing on Tiptoes and in Hovering, where the cracks of light become channels and the plates of color become blocks, the painting appears within itself – the viewing becomes seeing. Not all is subject to the image – but the opposite – the image is subjected to the seer.
In this context, Benjamin’s definition of the stain as a medium, and his explanation that the stain bursts forth from the surface as opposed to being instilled in it, read as a description of Reshef’s work. The stained quality of color, and the materiality of the paint as the stain express the relation Reshef builds between the seer and seen– her working processes in the studio and the performance of the work in the space; its passivity and its activity – the canvas as a sort of emulsion of photo paper on which the image is cast and from which the image emerges, as a material charged with light in a sort of photosynthetic process, as a distilled homeopathic concentrate of color, as part of an ecology of appearance – all of these link the seen and the seer in Reshef’s work. As part of her respect to all existing, Reshef adds the respect to the bare canvas that moves her to colorful suggestions, to transparencies, so as not to “burden” the canvas. She offers what can be offered to the world – a sense of balance. A painting that changed its focus (from self portrait to an array of abstract images whose orientation is to the stain rather than the image); an abstract painting reminiscent of a map or topography, viewed at times from an aerial view and at times from a side view.
The tension between the material and the spiritual in Reshef’s painting is expressed in the tension between actual presence and immanent possibilities. Out of the understanding that there is no escape in this world, that abstraction happens within it and not outside of it, Reshef found shelter in seeing.