Notes and explanations about my work - Catalogue 1990

You and me, waves breaking on the shore
The winds prints on the desert sand
Textures, mountains and cliffs hundreds of millions of years
old, the ripples of time.
is nothing but the one-time-only rhythms of an endless poem
that sometimes are transitory and sometimes lasting
forever.
Yes, Romanticism - Romanticism scrutinizing Reality.
Mourning and loving the instantaneous and desiring the
eternal. Romanticism without Mysticism. Romanticism whose
texture is used as an expression of the Rational.
The temporal and the eternal, / Awaiting and the ceaseless
flowing / Spirit and matter intertwined / Changing cycles, /
Complex simplicity. / Whirlpool of endless poetry / And you
and I make use of it / - the never-to-be repeated rhythms. /
And the whole is one. /
Somehow, I feel that I wouldn't have written these words if,
at a certain stage of my life, I hadn't left the big city to
live in the desert, first in Sinai and then in the Negev.
Throughout the ages, Philosophers have dealt with the
subject of eternity and infinity. I suppose that if I had
lived in the city, I would have arrived at this
confrontation ademically. However, the desert forced this
confrontation upon me, not through the intellect, rather
from somewhere deep inside of me. The obsessive intuitive
feelings that demanded release and an organized intellectual
explanation. Israeli Philosophy and Spinoza served as guides
in the weaving of my awareness of the confrontation with the
existing infinite reality.
Just as the desert forced this confrontation upon me, so it
similarly affected our ancestors thousands of years ago,
during their wanderings in the desert and in the course of
their lives in these very same places. Our ancestor, exactly
like us today, were impressed by the landscape of desert
plains with their eroded gorges, the feeling of the power of
nature pressed in the wearing down of rock mass by wind and
rain, the cliffs and craters, in other words, the endless
desert panorama, the strength or power of the silence and
overpowering presence of Place dictating way of life. All
these phenomena were and are part and parcel of man's
existence in the desert. The place radiates, then as now,
the lack of boundaries. Beyond this, the desert forces
self-awareness in the face of its powerful energy and
endless panoramas.
Today we find, in Sinai or in the Negev, the remains of
cultures, that located their burial grounds on mountain
peaks, thereby perpetuating the memory, the consciousness of
man, of the meeting of one eternity and another.
The monotheistic religion of Israel also took shape in the
desert. The philosophical message of Judaism belongs to a
culture that matured with the awareness of the meeting with
eternity. The desert is a place that shapes thought, which
touches and rolls about the pervasive existence to the abyss
and the firmament to the eternity of man observing eternity
and knowing that all is dust. This is the place, which makes
man aware that the only constant in the universe is the fact
that everything changes. Thought follows thought, the
universe and consciousness are an enormous river, flowing
and immutably changing.
Existential paradoxality which has left its imprint every
place and at every moment in the relationship between you
and I, the fleeting and the eternal, the fleeting which is
in the eternal and the eternal within the fleeting and the
feeling of loneliness as opposed to the desire to belong and
assimilate.

Life in the desert has had a crucial affect on me. My work
is the process of searching for a way to express these same
existential paradoxes. Work, which was created with a
feeling of the earth, is more typical of sculpture than
painting. Since I see myself as an artist tending towards
Romanticism, I have been searching for a way to express this
basic idea on canvas. In my article "Processes of Romantic
Thought" I wrote.
" ... Romantic thought is not a static fortress from which
nobody leaves and into which nobody enters. Romanticism is a
dynamic state of thought which metamorphosis according to
time and place, while always keeping its essence of
existential thought of ephemeral nature of man. A
characteristic motive woven through the work is the message
of longing, the yearning of man for the infinite. The
Romanticists will always look for different ways to express
their impossible desire for concretization. The same desire
to fuse with eternity is expressed in moments of prayer -
moments of eternity. ..."
I have attempted, to the best of ability, to eliminate from
my work all elements extraneous to the essence of Romantic
creation that were attached to it in earlier periods. The
essence of Romantic creation is the relationship between the
spirit of man and the universe. Therefore, no longer is
romantic work soaked in mythical thought. No longer will the
irrational and the transcendental reign. In my infinite
Space, romantic thought doesn't lose its force even if it is
tested through the rational and scientific thinking which
characterizes contemporary thought. In my world, the
infinite is no longer mystical, it has turned into the
concrete.
I am aware of the process of the expansion of the borders of
reality that science has placed before us. In other words,
the concretization of imagination. I am aware of the process
of the shattering of concepts such as metaphysics and the
transcendental - not because everything is known, understood
or explained, rather because of the fact of the acceptance
of the unknown or the unexplained into the realm of the
natural, as a result of the supernatural. At the same time,
making peace with the fact that man's hand, in split of his
success in expanding reality, falls short of touching the
natural eternity.
The visions of infinity, which I have attempted to transfer
to canvas, carry with them the flaw of linear thought. This
human limitation, on the one hand, circumscribes us with
each new confrontation with reality.
On the other hand, it is the only tool that we have. Linear
Thought leaves us with - Reality.

Yona  Levy-Grosman.