A personal exhibition by the artist Asaf Ben Zvi was opened April 18th at both galleries of the Jerusalem Print Workshop. The exhibition “Live Stitches” features the vast body of print work created at the workshop, since the 80s and till 2013. Curator: Irena Gordon.

The exhibition will be open till June 13, 2013.

”I am standing on the platform of the electrical tram, feeling wholly uncertain of my position in the world, in the city, in my family. I would be unable to offer even the most approximate statement of my justified expectations with regard to each or any of the above.” With these words begins Franz Kafka’s Passenger. In this short story Kafka describes the human condition as situated between standing and moving, continuousness and fragmentariness, between being part of something and being separate. Kafka presents doubt as a constant companion to consciousness, even, and perhaps mainly, in the most trivial situations.

The constant possibility of doubting the self-evident, as it arises from the story, is at the heart of Ben Zvi’s work, and receives dramatic and dreamy shades in the body of his print works at the Jerusalem Print Workshop.

Undermining takes place in the course of things, in a lifetime, like some part of a great, monumental, modernistic poem, which passes from a hand gesture or the movement of a bicycle wheel and continues from one work to the other, from etching to screenprint, from series to series, thus for twenty five years of recurring visits to the workshop.

”When you’re on the platform, on the same landing that Kafka describes,” says Ben Zvi, ”you miss out, rise, wait, you are happy, after or before. This place is always between complete stop and nonstop, yearning and not-yearning, and there is also something very formal, organized, and managed to it, yet at the same time also unexpected and changing. A platform is a very corporeal and tangible place, but the more you stand there waiting, the platform ceases to be physical. The word ”platform” constitutes the work’s climax, in which it does not yet exist, it is the moment of thought.”

”When I work alone in the studio,” says Ben Zvi, ”countless voices race through my head, whereas everything is different in the workshop. The noise there is in the space, in the clamor of people working, and then I contract into one string. It is somewhat a process of cleansing. In this sense I think of Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of the nervous system and how a man who explored the details of the physical and substantial in his drawings, actually touched the heart of the soul.”

The physical and substantial in Ben Zvi’s prints are the images that recur over the years: sailboats, gliders, squills – all relate to his childhood landscapes in the Jezreel Valley, the experience of being in the scenery, open to the valley’s vista, without engines, free of noise or pollution, flowering like the squill in the difficult conditions of the summer’s end, carried on air currents like the glider or the sailboat. Over the prints drifts the continuous motion of the plant or flag in the wind, bicycles pleasantly pass standing people, not as a powerful, intense machine, but as an element in nature, a substantial yet fleeting element, physical yet emotional.

In his material and figurative approach, Ben Zvi positions a metaphor regarding the dependent relations, the destruction and mutual fertilization, between man and man, between man and nature. In 2004, Ben Zvi created eight sugar-lift etchings for the Jerusalem Drawing Biennale, curated by Dror Burstein. The works, created after Yoram Vereté’s book of poems, Ba’al Bait (Householder), are a direct continuation of Ben Zvi’s interest in the movement of the earth, water, sky and landscape in general vis-à-vis the presence of man and his movement in space. Ben Zvi chose to use the sugar-lift technique in order to create works that seem to be in constant recreation, while the images of flags, gliders and ships float and rise from the paper like metamorphosic, changing entities. The sugar-lift technique creates for him the combination of softness and hardness – the subtlety of the brushstroke against the hardness of the metal. Ben Zvi: ”For me, sugar-lift is like the relationship of sea and land: the sea covers and retreats, and then land appears. The exposure’s softness, like the effortless rhythm of the brush, separates the sugar-lift from the rest of the etching techniques. Sugar-lift allows the existence of an impossible encounter between one decisive brushstroke, and one cosmic.”

Asaf Ben Zvi’s print work is like Kafka’s stand on the platform – connected to life, but also separate, grasping all those elements that are concealed.

Excerpts from: “Live Stitches. On Asaf Ben Zvi’s Prints at the Jerusalem Print Workshop” by Irena Gordon.