As I Set /

Six vast scenery paintings constitute the center of Dan Birenboim’s exhibition, representing memory, excitement, thought and the attention he gives nature from within his studio.

A cypress in a path, a bald mountain, a wadi, mountain, village on the horizon, dune, migrating birds, a lump of earth and sky are motives reiterated in Birenboim’s work. Now, in this huge format, they visibly become a sublime, exalted theme. Since he does not go into nature to paint, the breadth of his canvas enables Birnboim to work slowly, test the limits of his memory, conduct a long elaborate dialogue with the emerging painting, be submerged in thought and imagine. The internal tumult, the exaltation, resembles a meditative religious rite, hence the exhibition’s name*.

The familiar Israeli landscape encounters Birenboim’s palette creating a captivating estrangement. The yellow, the pale blue and brown, the dense light, the scorched frame and the Eretzisraeli glare become deep orange and blue – imaginary colors.

The stylized color, fierce and unique is a reflection of Birenboim’s perception of scenery painting as a personal, spiritual experience, rather than the replication of a specific reality. By Shaul Tchernichovsky’s poem, "Man is but the imprint of his native landscape”. Conversely, in Birenboim’s paintings the artist designs the landscape in the imprint of his own soul.

The two outstanding works in the exhibition convey this sensation to the observer. In one, a black and white image of a youth facing a desolate tree, in the other an adult is submerged into a colorful forest. The imaginary compositions reflect the rapport between the figures and the landscape as an existential enigma, placated, contemplative, symbiotic, quasi-bewitched. Like Birenboim and the landscape.

* "I have placed God before me constantly", Psalms 16:8