Wave Theory

2019

Beit Haomanim, Tel Aviv. Curator: Arie Berkowitz

GOOD VIBRATIONS

Text by: Arie Berkowitz, Curator

“We favor the simple expression of the complex thought.” This statement made by American painter Mark Rothko in the mid-20th century is still valid at present, suggesting that viewers view artworks carefully with infinite contemplation as they stand facing his large canvases, with their colorful fields.

Shony Rivnay’s series of paintings on view at the Tel Aviv Artists’ House result directly from the spirit of Rothko’s statement. His large-scale paintings invite viewers to join the artist on his inner journey so rich in color, textures, and abstract asymmetrical compositions. The artist has set out here on a personal journey into the soul’s labyrinth, resulting in patches of color weaving a multilayered musical fabric, leaning on the tension between the revealed and the concealed, between the material and the spiritual. All of these elements come together to form a rhythmic collage with layers of surfaces of clean colors, drawn lines, and an unexpected colorful vibration shattering the comfortable balance with a precise counterpoint.

A gaze at Shony Rivnay’s oeuvre shows creative freedom suffused with enjoyment and awareness of the large-scale formats and dynamic compositions without barriers, with an intuitive feeling of inner truth.

According to Jungian theory, which touched upon Kabbala and Christian mysticism, God contracted himself into an inner spark. The search for God is turning inward to the self, with reciprocal relations between the cosmic macrocosm and microcosm. There is a very close connection between cosmic events and the inner essence of the human being, a sort of transcendental symbiosis. These marks appear in Shony Rivnay’s paintings. The large canvases contain color patches and forms that continue beyond the frame into infinity. These are internal landscapes -- soul-landscapes inspired by spirituality. Rivnay’s painterly abstraction is biomorphic, providing an expanse for thought that encodes a mystical secret, creating new meaning for the details making up the painting.

Rivnay’s professional skills in treating the painterly surface with a wide range of textures create an artistic composition enabling an infinite number of visual associations, beauty, and a deeply aesthetic mystical experience.

The group of works by Shony Rivnay on view in the Tel Aviv Artists’ House forms a cohesive poetic unit, one which is sincere and deep, active on the seam line between the concrete and the conceptual.

SHONY RIVNAY / COMPOSITIONS

Text by: Dr. Smadar Sheffi

Broad gestures, generous color patches, luscious paint spots. Shony Rivnay’s paintings celebrate movement and sound suffused with the present, an encounter of the gaze with an avalanche of colors and shapes. It is equally fitting to write about his work as paintings of cessation, coagulation, perception of the moment, and an heroic attempt conscious of the futility of stopping time.

Attentive observation to the paintings elicits the reading of a journey through unknown terrain, as if we are viewing landscape photographs of strange planets. We clearly lack the tools to analyze the images that demand a fresh reading. On a spectrum moving between tension and melting, these beautiful paintings (as lovely as a rainbow) are enigmatic.

Time – the elusive but most present element in our lives – stands at the center of Rivnay’s oeuvre. For the past 15 years he has been making drawings on a daily basis, creating a huge scroll. The scroll, like a film/videotape or a story, can be rolled back to the past. The promise of the future, almost a religious belief, is embodied in the thick roll of paper that continues on, wound around a wooden rod. The scroll of drawings, never exhibited and not on view here, is the subconscious of the works, of the numbered compositions which are isolated moments engaged in Time, in the distillation and freezing of a blink of an eye.

The stream of unrestrained colors is breathtaking: greens alongside deep roses, opaque azure near orange, violet-black adjacent to pale shades of orange. As the paintings are in acrylics, the forms can be repeated with meticulous precision. Rivnay works in the abstract tradition, from early Kandinsky through American Abstraction, especially canonical Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s and ‘60s. Observation of Rivnay’s paintings brings to mind works by Clyfford Still, Willem De Kooning, or Franz Kline, but memory sharpens the differences: Rivnay inserts tiny details and abstract patterns. The contrast between the large gestures and the small patterns, which are often repetitive, are perhaps linked to his first orderly attempts in art which were to copy the scientific paintings by his father the entomologist, as well as his own enchantment with fractals in which each part replicates the whole.

In abstract painting, observation and not representation is the essence. In still life paintings and portraits, or any other figurative subject, the initial, instinctive analysis is the identification of objects or subjects, and only afterwards comes the contemplation of the painterly qualities. Rivnay’s search is for something non-narrative, non-symbolic, and non-graphic. He tracks the essence, peeling off contents that are external to the act of making art. The paintings represent themselves alone. The issues of art-making, such as volume vs. flatness, or minimization vs. multiplicity, underlie the works.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, Abstraction – waiving narrative and preferring formality grounded in reality – has been perceived as progress, a term charged with the promise of redemption. Until nearly the end of the 20th century, art was described as a linear development from figuration to abstraction. Over the past few decades, “figurative” and “abstract” have ceased to be seen as dichotomous. At the heart of Rivnay’s wide-ranging oeuvre which include sculpture, installations, performance, the group of abstract paintings is perhaps the most intimate, as it reflects on an internal reflection. His paintings are composed of non-specific images, yet they are entirely individual.

Thinking about his work in this way connects to the issue of Rivnay’s interest in philosophy and alternative readings of reality, resulting in doubting the visible. In this way, too, Rivnay continues the tradition of the link between abstract art to a broad range of spiritual approaches from various cultures, such as in works by two early abstract artists – Johannes Itten, who was active in the Bauhaus, the major institute of Modernism, and Hilma af Klimt, who made her abstract works far from all institutions. Her paintings, documenting her spiritual experiences, have received wide international recognition in recent years.

Rivnay’s paintings become a space despite and within the constraints of the two-dimensional. The composition and the tactility succeed in creating an intense physical experience which seems to challenge the limits of the works themselves. In the chaos of color and form it seems that they are on the threshold between exterior and interior, between crystallization and deconstruction. Nevertheless, what resonates in them is the precise sound, like the deep continuous vibration emanating from the Tibetan bowl in his studio.