Returns on paper

There is a generous array of largely pencil- and graphite- based items currently on display at the Jerusalem Artists’ House, as part of the sixth edition of the drawing biennale.

By BARRY DAVIS
Hillel Roman, ‘Expansion,’ 2016 (photo credit: ELAD SARIG)
Hillel Roman, ‘Expansion,’ 2016
(photo credit: ELAD SARIG)
As technology strides confidently on and the world becomes ever more virtual, there appears to be an equal-and-opposite balancing dynamic constantly in progress. While there are creators of all kinds of gripping video art works and other expertly computer manipulated endeavors, it is gratifying to see offerings of good old analog, definitively hands-on stuff hanging on gallery walls for our undiluted viewing pleasure.
There is a generous array of largely pencil- and graphite- based items currently on display at the Jerusalem Artists’ House, as part of the sixth edition of the drawing biennale, which goes by the self-explanatory name of “The Return of Paper – Reflections on Drawing.” The exhibition was curated by Edna Moshenson and Sally Haftel Naveh, and closes on February 11.
You might think that – to paraphrase 20th-century American writer Gertrude Stein – a drawing is just a drawing, but as you make your way around the three floors of Artists’ House, you begin to understand that producing lined-based works of art can take on all sorts of directions, and feed off a multitude of mind-sets.
Naturally, the exhibition incorporates an intrinsic reference to the paper, which serves as the foundation of all the items on display, and the 42 artists in the lineup embraced a diverse approach to the base material.
The contribution by Erez Israeli, for example, with his 2012 two-parter Concrete Composition I and Concrete Composition 2, takes the spectator along different trajectories as a vertical black line emerges from a darker backdrop, from between two white paper folds. The material mix spreads with the inclusion of a slim plate of concrete in the lower area of each work, creating a highly tactile interface between substances of very different physical and visual qualities, forging an oxymoronic fusion.
Hadas Hassid’s Oxidized Cardboard and Six Immersions confronts the basic properties of paper, divesting it of its universally accepted role as a drawing surface through a protracted process of applying layers of industrial paint. The result is more than a little reminiscent of conceptual ideas that were all the rage in the 1970s and conveys a sculptural feel.
The overriding sense is one of pushing the accepted boundaries of the physical substratum and the visual overlay to their very limits and – possibly – then some.
“When Ruth [Malal Zadka, director of the Jerusalem Artists’ House] asked me to help curate the exhibition I looked back and saw that the previous biennale exhausted the approach to drawing as a self-defining genre that tries to explore its borders,” says Moshenson.
“Landscape drawings and urban drawings became pretty standard fare. The last biennale was called “Beyond the Paper,” and the curator sought to address the line, which is the central defining element of drawing, but separately from what she called its long-held fusion with paper.”
That ethereal ethos has been reversed in the present edition of the biennale.
“When I was asked to help with the exhibition I thought we should check out what might happen if we restored paper, and the traditional tools of drawing – paper, charcoal and graphite – and looked at the return of paper.”
Moshenson did some field research and quickly noted that there was, indeed, a general movement back to the roots of the discipline.
“I saw that all kinds of artists had embarked on an almost nostalgic, and very substantial, trip back to paper and to drawing, and intensive use of basic drawing implements.”
Then again, the artists were not starting from scratch and hadn’t been living on the moon for the last few years. They were all conscious of the previous trend away from traditional drawing, and paper.
As such, their work was – consciously or subconsciously – informed by that transient school of thought.
“The artists’ return to paper came with consideration of drawing,” notes Moshenson. “That comes across in the exhibition.”
It does indeed, as do the various hands-on approaches to paper.
“You can see that in the first room,” Moshenson continues. “It is full of paper, and different processes with paper, and even drawing using paper.”
The latter references incisions made in sheets of paper, and a range of techniques – some of which involved getting down and dirty – and even adopting a seemingly destructive line of creative action. Ariel Schlesinger’s two-piece Untitled (Haaretz), for example, was produced by burning perforations in newspapers, giving a somewhat higgledy-piggledy lattice effect. The resulting gaps also display the edges of the passage of the flames, and reveal some of the layers, which are scorched to differing degrees.
“You get a strong sense of the material, the paper,” says Moshenson, adding that she welcomes the revival of interest in corporeal works, much as the LP sector has roared back into robust health, as access to online sources of music has proliferated.
“You know, they only had to start talking about the so-called death of painting, and suddenly there was a flurry of painting activity. The reaction opposed the tendency [away from painting].
People talked about the death of paper, and that we now experience reality via screens, that are not material, and that sparked a return to material.
The artists in this exhibition, I think, took that to heart. All the works in the exhibition could only be made with paper.”
There is also a wide generational stretch across the works.
“The exhibition opens with works by Moshe Gershuni [who died earlier this week at the age of 80],” says Moshenson. Curiously, one of the Gershuni exhibits also has a scorched section, beneath which the artist wrote in pencil: “The paper is white outside, and is black only on the outside.”
The co-curator goes with the Gershuni inside-outside flow.
“Where does an image [on paper] originate?” she muses. “Is it cast onto the paper from the outside, or does it emerge from inside the paper?” That is an intriguing concept, and there are fascinating treatments, both of the material itself and the concept of paper, right across the board.
Noga Inbar, for example, has a tendency toward installation-type work, obtaining her raw materials from physical and scanned archives, libraries and markets. For Inbar, anything goes – as long as the main tangible point of reference is paper.
Michal Baror also enjoys trawling obscure sources of information and objects, from forgotten archives and museum collections, to seemingly documents and common-or-garden artifacts that she collects and then arranges out of context.
The paper presentation plot thickens, as you make your way through the show, taking in outsized ink-stained sheets, sculpturally oriented pieces, architecturally influenced items, such as Eliya Cohen’s alluring polychromic Maps and internationally acclaimed Deganit Berest’s installation of black sheets of paper with eye cutouts.
“We did a lot of field research, and went to a lot of artists’ studios all over the country to try to see where drawing is going right now,” says Haftel Naveh.
“I think the biennale gives a good idea of the way things are going in the field. I think there is something very moving about the return to paper.”


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