Shadow / Jonathan Ofek + Abi Shek

Dealing with the shadow and its presence in the human creation has been known and familiar since the first days of art until today, as a tool and central expression with varied paths and meanings. Looking directly at the source of light, or as been described before, the big ‘being’, blinds the eyes and may even cause permanent loss of sight or disorientation. Somewhat like an eclipse, when you can look directly at the sun while it’s in the shade, so does art – looking directly on reality when it is shaded. The desire to delineate the ‘being’ is achieved by using the shade.
In Northern civilizations, the shadow is perceived as a negative, threatening place, weakening and limiting. Contrary, in Middle-Eastern cultures, in the desert, the shade is a desired spot – a place where it is possible to find cover, hiding from the blazing sun, living.
Abraham Ofek and Moshe Shek are the trees under which Jonathan and Abi were raised and brought up, where they received foundation of their art. As their fathers, that turned their sight a lot towards ancient civilizations and their materialistic heritage, they also seek to define the code of their own culture by leaning on the relics of predating cultures. Their claim is that that it is possible to collect and assemble knowledge and by doing so – expand the perception of reality from generation to generation, thus making it more coherent. The persisting digging into historical cultures can also be looked upon as searching via shadows, trying to define reality by the shades that lay in different times and situations, from different directions and changing intensities, from those existing beings – animals and places.
Reality contains folds of different layers of consciousness (as in the fable of Plato’s cave). Shadows are shading each other, swallowing one another, and create ‘hybrid shades’. In the blackness of memories reality and imagination co-exist. In the sunset hour, in the junction where light and darkness meet, the gaps and differences become more distinct; the shadow grows longer. At this very hour, time of the echo of life, the shadow appears in full strength like the shade of a cow on the skyline. Human life as a shadow evaporating with a blink of an eye.

Choresh Shteinfield Culture critic