Can Art Magazine - Gallery - Roni Reuven at The Tel Aviv Artists' House

Roni Reuven at The Tel Aviv Artists' House

Artist Roni Reuven, director of the Art Studio in Yavne, celebrates fifty years of creation and his seventieth birthday with an exhibition displaying a selection of his works.
The art works in the exhibition reveal a primordial and chaotic world, featuring dark and stormy primal landscapes charged with ancient symbolism. Archaic figures peek out from dense vegetation, mysterious forests harbor ancient secrets, and water bursts forth powerfully in all directions like a threatening surge. Active volcanoes tower in the background, and a black hole that draws the flora and fauna into it.
The four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—are also depicted in shades of brown, black, gray, and white, with the energy of heat and fire radiating from them.
The compositions creates visual tension, dynamic and dens. They are painted with bold brushstrokes and a dark, monochromatic palette. This tension is intensified by the contrast between the large, unstretched canvases, which convey transience and instability, and the small works on wooden cubes, which offer a sense of stability and a grip on turbulent reality. This duality reflects the human condition.
Reuven searches for the unique aspects in every natural phenomenon, and several of his works reference and echo the landscape paintings of 19th century Romantic Movement painters. These artists saw landscape primarily as a tool for conveying emotions and experiences, and in their works, they simultaneously expressed "both an internal reality in the artist's soul, and a transcendental reality – one that exists beyond the world of phenomena."* Similarly, Reuven does not describe visual reality but rather relates to the energies of nature and its power. He translates the awe and horror of the sublime into a visual language that is both powerful and disturbing.
The exhibition title, " In the place where a void opens up and is revealed", echoes the core of Reuven's work, especially the motif of the black hole, and it even hints at the search for meaning in that void. Through his evocative and enigmatic paintings, the artist invites us to confront the complexity of the human experience, which moves between chaos and order and with the deep connection between the human soul and the natural world. Perhaps, as in Zen Buddhism, we will discover in the void that is torn open a potential for a new beginning.

*Ruth Marcus, "Art versus Reality: Landscape Painting in the 19th Century," Shirat HaMada (Song of Science), 2014, pp. 132-135

Dalia Danon
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