Imagine holding in your hand a lump of sand that the blazing sun dried, transforming it into a soft stone or a sort of rock. Now imagine that you tighten your grip on it, and how the stone magically transforms into a pile of sparkling golden sand flakes. This simple transformation in state of aggregation characterizes the works by the five graduates of the School of Art, Social Studies, and Culture at Sapir College featured in Fresh Paint 3. Like the magical moment in which the stone dissipates between our fingers, the sense of evolution, of existence elsewhere—the work of these five artists invokes such curiosity due to the change in state of aggregation. Like that sandy stone, these works also transpire on the thin line between brittle and solid, presence and absence, moistness and dryness. Hagit Levy’s ceramic plates carry their materiality, from the moist to the dry, from the traditional “Delftian” quality to the Ritalin instruction appended to them. Sigal Naftali’s motorcycle parts were cast from a fetishistic coating surrendering a shiny masculine affinity, which has transformed into exposed, frail internal organs. The peeling door in Dorit Liberman’s work signifies entry and exit, yet remains marked by a morbid figure of a man-animal. Orly Nezer’s work presents hard road sections that have dried, dissolved, and been orphaned, but nevertheless continue to carry memories. In Dganit Ben-Admon’s plaster work, figures that look like pots with carnivorous plants or possibly sleeping bats perpetuate danger, fear and rejection, which are nevertheless accessible thanks to their new state of aggregation. The changes in the state of aggregation in each of the works and in the total corpus invite one to wander among them as if they were the ruins of an ancient civilization; this wandering embodies excitement which stems from expectation, like the noise of an invisible train or an imminent flood; even if the promised event never takes place, the suspension of that expectation suffices.

Danny Yahav-Brown and Liav Mizrahi