Odyssey of the Hallway

My acquaintance with Simon Adjiashvili's interiors is very different from the usual acquaintance with art. For years Simon lived in the apartment under mine in Tel Aviv. The apartments were identical in structure as well as in various features such as doors and windowsills. And so when I saw his paintings, which are based on his apartment, I saw my apartment as well. In the meantime Simon moved away, but when I look at these paintings I can see in them, perhaps more than the "ordinary" observer, a letter from Simon addressed directly to me. I live almost literally within some of these paintings.

I would not have mentioned this personal detail had I not thought that there is something about it which is not just personal. Because first and foremost these paintings transform a familiar space - familiar even to those who do not live in my apartment - to a space of the spirit, of the secret and of the imagination. He who knows these rooms from within sees this at once, but you do not need to live in them to see it.

Walter Benjamin wrote that the wanderer leaves his doorstep for the streets of the city like a sailor whose ship has anchored in a strange city. Simon adopts this suggestion but in reverse: this is how he observes his own house. This exhibition is a journey into the exotica of the familiar.

Simon's paintings transform the home into a fragmented puzzle. The puzzle cannot be put together into a complete picture. On the contrary, with each additional painting the puzzle grows, the big picture recedes a little further. Therefore the particularly loaded areas in these paintings are the areas of border, or transition areas from one space to another. These are the areas where the details could have related to the totality and yet they do not. The doorsills between adjacent rooms are such areas. In an ordinary house the passage is neutral and routine. Does anyone think "I have passed from the living room to the hall"? But here, in some of these paintings a large region of darkness separates the space that we see from the rest. Perhaps this darkness has a border and in another painting you will find another room at the end of the dark, but in one painting an ordinary living room opens out towards the observer, who gazes at this ordinary room as if from the other side of the night. At the far end of the painting the abyss of darkness can be seen again, reborn and thickening, leading who knows where. Perhaps there too at the other end someone stands and gazes inward. From darkness to darkness, darkness through which a faint light has glowed, the house ? that is, the painting ? can be seen.

There is a beautiful book of poetry by Israel Eliraz whose title is "How to go into a room you have never left". This exhibition brings a simple response to Eliraz's question through the paintings. To draw your room thus means to enter into it, to really enter it even though you have always been within. It is a common clich? that art enables us a new view of our familiar world. But for me, with Simon's paintings, the clich? is very real. I look at his paintings as if at a dream dreamt by someone else ? a dream about my place, my room. This is the private mythology of my own living room, of the door, the odyssey of the hallway.

Looking at these paintings we can see that what we perceive as "place", that is as a localized and defined entity, can widen to infinity. He who understands this does not really need foreign travels. Every corner of every house can be many changing places. Simon creates this infinity both because he leads us to ask ourselves if we have not already been here, in another painting, and because he opens the doors and the windows not only to light, which painting by its very nature so loves, but also to darkness. And in the darkness a place can grow without limit. As children we knew this. There is a hint of this childish terror in these paintings. Think of actually walking through them ? in total silence, barefoot, in the middle of the night. Walking like this, watching like this, is what this exhibition offers.

The house disintegrates and is rebuilt at the same time. In some of the paintings there are lines of perspective which seem to be taken from architectural blueprints, as if these paintings are plans, sketches for a future house. But at the same time they are a dissolution of a house which has already been built. These paintings lie between the house already built in Tel Aviv and the imaginary house being built right now. It does not seem unlikely to me to see this intermediate state against the background of the painter being an immigrant.

This intermediate state of the house stands out because of the darkness. The Japanese author Kamo no Chomei (1153-1216) wrote that "the limitless view created in the imagination surpasses anything that may be seen clearly by the eye" and Yoshida Kenko, 14th century Japanese author, wrote, "I feel sorry for the man who says that night dims the beauty of things. At night colors, ornaments, and richness of materials show to their best advantage... a voice heard in the dark - a voice that betrays the fear of being overheard [by a stranger, DB] ? is endearing. Perfumes and the sound of music too are best at night". Therefore, Kenko suggests that "visits to shrines and temples are best made on days when others do not go, and by night", and in general "in all things, it is beginnings and ends that are interesting".

Simon's rooms are almost all found in this state, before the beginning or on the verge of disappearance. Darkness will soon fall, and perhaps the light has only begun to reveal that which is in the room. One way or another, the reality of the room is revealed just from its being on the verge of nonexistence, on the verge of invisibility. When we come across a blinding light we shade our eyes with our hands. What would be the right gesture against strong darkness? In other words: these paintings ask you to pay attention to the way you look at them. You cannot just cast a glance.

Simon's rooms are the kind of which Junichiro Tanizaki wrote in his essay "In praise of shadows". Facing such a room you might sense "a fear that... you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray". With all this, there is magic in this invitation into the dark. Because this darkness hints at infinity. Its direct continuation is very far away. The darkness in these rooms is in direct communication with the dark sky. On the wall of Simon's studio I saw a small painting of the sky with a star shining, and next to it - a small Caravaggio reproduction. The whole story in a nutshell.

The magic of the room is stronger sevenfold when out of the darkness emerges its total contrast, just as the star in the sky captures our hearts because it is surrounded by black space. Tanizaki writes of the mystery of gold in the darkness. How gold in the dimness becomes more mysterious and more significant than gold in full light, which is showcase gold. Look what happens in one of Simon's paintings, how at the head of the ascending stairs something from inside the room suddenly casts a light. Or when a mirror suddenly glows on a table in another painting. This too is "gold".

Most of the paintings in the exhibition could be perceived as different wings of a single house. Even if they were painted in two houses they create the same feeling of wholeness which emerges from pieces of a place unified by a hidden "gravity" (as in a musical work such as Bach's "Goldberg Variations", where the connection between the parts is in the background and not in the "revealed" melody.) That is why the painting which peers into a neighboring house is so strong. Turning outward is a rare gesture in Simon's paintings, and the diagonal of the composition emphasizes this. Here the gaze emerging from the house reveals, to his amazement perhaps, another house, not so very different, it appears, from his own. We see a little, but it is enough to see that there too a quiet emptiness reigns, there too furniture is sparse, there too is a darkness which comes out towards you until you are able to see.

Dror Burstein

18.2.10

Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, trans. Donald Keene, Columbia U.P. 1967 [1330-1332], pp. 164-165, 115; Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. T. J. Harper & E. G. Seidensticker, Vintage 1977 [1933-1934], p. 35-36.





Other texts coming soon.