The surfaces of Mosh Kashi’s paintings seem as though they are made of silver foil stretched over the frame, and only the traces of the brushstrokes divulge the trail of the brush on the canvas. On these surfaces, drawings appear as if from nowhere, while the traces of the brush movement as it forms the image attest to the essence of the body language contained in the drawing hand. Until now, this language has been encapsulated in Kashi’s painting between the layers of paint and the polished surface. Kashi harnesses the quality of drawing in order to give shape to the birth of the first line, and at the same time, to its demise.

These drawings mark a turning point in Kashi’s painting, which up until now has been hermetic and meticulous. They present unraveled drawing, exposed by its skeletal appearance, which is sometimes present as a poignant image and at times dissolves into the emptiness that envelops it. The canvases painted with silver or gold generate an intentional alienation to the possibility that this is the habitat of a plant of some sort, while simultaneously giving the feeling that the drawing is pushed to the front of the painting, as though the background and the image are separate entities. Like they were portraits distinguished from the sphere that surrounds them.

The series of drawings Ash Flora echoes the exploration of botanical encyclopedias illustrators throughout the years, rooted in drawing and etching. However, in some of the works, the shift that Kashi introduces by merging the two disciplines (drawing and etching) points to a different direction: the world of photography, where photographed images materialize only in a hermetic, closed world, like a darkroom. The luminescent metallic surface that serves as the drawing’s background is evocative of the photo paper, the gelatin silver print, in the literal sense, but also in the sense that reveals the gap between it and the world of painting, which takes shape and forms from gaze to gaze. The drawings have volume and tones, yet their shadow is contained within, and does not exist outside the bounds of the image. These drawings often look like a flattened shadow of the image that was ostensibly left outside the canvas – a feeling enhanced by the mirror-like silver paint in the painting’s background, with subtle reflections of the surrounding space it encloses.

The body of works Ash Flora was created concurrently with the series of panoramic paintings A Cappella – the studio serving as a shared living environment of two distinct disciplines that have been assimilated in one another: drawing and painting. The supposedly different modes of operation bring forth questions that explore representations and possibilities for giving form to the action, to the gesture of painting, as images that carry meaning, so that the painting functions as a drawing and the drawing as a painting.

The large dimensions of the paintings in relation to the drawings further stress the private scale of both worlds: the drawing, smaller and exploratory, while the painting is like a materialization of a panoramic space with mass and color from end to end; expansive landscapes converted into a heavenly universe with no beginning or end – a universe in which the glimpses of light measure a false infinity.

These paintings and drawings are another chapter in Kashi’s exploration of questions of painting in recent years, at the center of which lies an examination of the distinction but also the affinity between the sublime and the trivial through a profound painterly research that could be compared to the discovery of the tension between vocal sound and absolute silence.

Mosh Kashi was born in Jerusalem in 1966. He graduated from HaMidrasha Art School (1987) and holds a master’s degree in Art from Bretton Hall University, Leeds, UK (2000). Kashi is a senior lecturer in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and head of the sculpting track in the Department of Ceramics and Glass Design.  He exhibited 10 solo shows and participated in dozens of group shows in Israeli and international museums and galleries. His works are included in prominent private and public collections, including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Haifa Museum, Tefen Museum, Recanati and more.  A comprehensive retrospective show of Kashi’s works was held for six months in 2012 at Stef Wertheimer’s Tefen Museum. The exhibition featured almost 100 works and was accompanied by an extensive artist’s book. At 2014 Mosh Kashi exhibited a solo exhibition ASH DREAMER at Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, and at 2016 exhibited a solo exhibition A cappella also in Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art

Major prizes: Young Artist Award (1994); Artistic Encouragement Award (1997); The Minister of Education and Culture Award (2004).