מאיר אפלפלד – תערוכה חדשה

[אתר גלריה 33.
מקורות בסוף התרגום לאנגלית:]

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"Painting must occupy the ground between resemblance and non-resemblance," Balthus is quoted in an essay about the influence of Chinese painting on his work. This imaginary ground is a place where matter and spirit, the world and the "I", the visible and the invisible, the concrete and the infinite are all held in balance. This is the quintessential place of classic Chinese painting. Sometimes this place comes into existence, in different ways, in Western art. This is also the place for which the painting of Meir Appelfeld strives.
His paintings do not strive to mimic reality but at the same time they do not ignore it. The visible, secular world undergoes a constant transfiguration, which occurs in the final realization of the forms, but also exists in the paintings as the traces of a process. This is where Appelfeld's "drawerly" sensibility is apparent. Some of the paintings in the exhibit are based on study drawings, but the paintings which were made from direct observation also disclose the "drawerly" gaze.
By "drawerly" gaze I mean a painter's sensibility which recognizes the importance of observation, but includes within observation other elements: time, becoming, will, memory, and imagination. All these inevitably change what is visible to the eye. "It is all very well to copy what you see, but it is much better to draw only what you still see in your memory (…). Then you only reproduce what has struck you, that is to say the essential, and so your memories and your fantasy are freed from the tyranny which nature holds over them," said Degas, in a passage Appelfeld quotes in a lecture.
Drawing is the entry ticket to the balanced ground Balthus mentions, but also an exit ticket from the tyranny of nature (and of the gaze). Drawing breathes the spiritual and the personal into painting, marking it with the distinctive events of the work-time in the studio, which are embodied in the painter's individual touch. And because drawing carries spirit with it, or "lead[s] color through the paths of the spirit," as Matisse said, it cannot be entirely committed to resemblance to external, visible reality. Reality "guards" it from subjective idiosyncrasy; spirit protects it from enslavement to the objective.
This is seen well in still life, 2005. Ostensibly, this painting was doomed to fail: how can one connect both sides of this bottle convincingly? Yet, it happens. It happens despite the risk represented by this painting, and in fact, because of it. The painting begins on the right side with one thing, but on the left it is already speaking a different language, like a sentence that begins in Hebrew and ends in Japanese, or a phrase that begins in Hebrew and ends in piano notes. This painting negates itself, and thus creates itself (or does it go from chaotic negation to creation?). The painting thinks (imagines, aspires) itself as it comes into being and balances itself, and it presents this entire process of thinking and becoming on its surface, openly.
In this struggle for balance, Meir Appelfeld's painting achieves a unique and important place in the small renaissance of Israeli painting in recent years. Meir Appelfeld's painting takes an approach of restrained involvement, seeking the balance between the impersonal, objective, gaze, and the proximate, involved gaze. This is no less than a struggle for the medium's language, a struggle over the question of "how to speak," which precedes the question of "what to say." This struggle for balance is especially present in Appelfeld's nudes. Each of these paintings stops at a different point between the individual existence of the woman represented, and the individual existence of the painter, who casts the "net" of the painting over her, thus, of necessity, turning her into an aspect of him and of his gaze. It is interesting to see how in the transition from the nude sketches, several of the women change their intimate, erotic, concrete appearance, to a more distant, sometimes cruel and more abstract one. This transition illustrates how "occupying the ground" of which Balthus speaks, is not an easy thing, but one involving constant struggle.
With these introductory remarks I wished to point out only a few of the characteristics of Meir's language, as I perceive them. But, of course, there is much more to his paintings. I can only allude to this here. The large interior is dominated by a lamp. Although it is turned off, it illuminates the painting in a metaphorical sense, unifying it through the geometry of diagonal rays, not with rays of light. The lamp-stand is fashioned after a Greek column – perhaps in the Ionic style. With this diminutive allusion Appelfeld introduces an entire world of sacredness (let us say, the Acropolis) into his studio.
To paraphrase Maurice Merleau-Ponty, painting endows visibility to that which secular vision thinks of as invisible. This invisible may appear in many ways: as this stirring temple-relic in a Jerusalem room; as the objective realization through color or geometry of a "transparent" feeling in a nude (a mouth rendered as a ruled line); as the transfiguration of a solid vessel into a "liquid" state. The invisible may also appear, if we return to the large interior, in the thin humor which recognizes the hidden humanity of the still life objects: these three vessels are featured in some of Meir's still life painting, posing with all the gravity and decorum of actors under the spotlight. But here they suddenly become free, peripheral, sideline spectators, like actors on holiday, sitting in the gallery to watch the play they had performed just yesterday.

Sources

Barnes, R., (ed.), Degas by Degas, Webb & Bower 1990, p. 40.
Flam, J. D., (ed.) Matisse on Art, Phaidon 1973, pp. 120-1.
Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis, Northwestern U. Press 1969.
Xiaozhou, X., "The Landscape is Very Chinese at the Moment…", in: J. Clair (ed.), Balthus, Rizzoli 2001, pp. 89-102.

Translated by Ilana Goldberg