1 Untitled, acrylic on paper, 266x388 cm, 2020

2 Untitled, acrylic on paper cut out, 210x260 cm, 2020

3 Untitled, acrylic on paper, 210x214 cm, 2019

4 Untitled, acrylic on paper cut out, 13x185 cm, 2019

5 Untitled, acrylic on paper cut out, 165x130 cm, 2020

6 Untitled, acrylic on cardboard, 60x40 cm, 2020

7 Untitled, acrylic on paper cut out, 95x130 cm, 2019

8 Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 120x100 cm, 2020

9-13 “Armpit Garden", Acrylicon paper cutout, installation view, 2020

Armpit Garden
Eyal Sasson

"Armpit Garden"; Eyal Sasson's exhibition, resembles a painting installation whose limbs have been blown up to gigantic proportions and out of control, dominating all the walls of the exhibition space. It consists of large-scale paintings, raging, gliding, and bleeding, that break through the edges of the square format, and undermine the
familiar boundaries of the painting medium. Together, they combine to create a model of disturbed nature; a blooming garden that overflows almost to the point of decay, in which liquid and fleshy bodily elements are mixed and create gaping, predatory plant monsters. Sasson creates surreal hybrids between enlarged and
inflated elements that isolate him from nature and the body's limbs and fluids. The result is physical and mental landscapes full of effusions or outpourings of color- which, in his opinion, correspond to the eruptions of foliage or blossoms, or to the
gushing of some spring – that raise reflections on the wear and tear of the body and
its collapse.

Sasson’s painting is reflective, referring to himself. He does not seek to represent parts of reality, but to build a fantastic and emotional world that does not pretend to
imitate any landscape. In this exhibition, he breaks not only the boundaries between inside and outside and between nature and the body, but also its conventions and the limits of the contemporary painting medium, within which he has been working for about twenty years. With the virtuosity of a skilled painter, Sasson creates a system of disguises and gaps: under a veil of external beauty and saturated and toxic color, which appears to be playful in the offensive, parts of the painting are full of effusions and intentionally ugly. The exhibition's cheerful and deceptive appearance seems to conceal a pain that comes with the disillusionment of dreams and hopes. Sasson paints from a sense of satiety and excess, almost vomiting, and thus puts the aesthetic values ​​by which he operates as a painter under renewed scrutiny. Like the
tongues of paint that defiantly extend from the wall, Sassoon seems to be cutting a tongue and seeking to challenge accepted concepts of beauty, the status of painting, and his own place as a painter in the art world.

Curator
Ravit Harari