Formally Speaking

Boaz Noy

Boaz Noy paints exhibitions. These are usually exhibitions in which he himself or his friends have participated; sometimes exhibits which he was involved in installing. He does not take photographs of the actual installation, but he remembers it in detail. In the studio, he re-enacts the exhibition on canvas. The series of exhibition paintings refers to exhibits of artists from The Wing Gallery, Haifa; to a secret art exhibition in Tel Aviv, a group exhibition in a gallery in Ramle, Yehiel Shemi's studio in Kibbutz Cabri and Belu-Simion Fainaru's exhibit at the gallery in another Kibbutz. The paintings sketch out a map of the exhibition spaces across the country and enable a broad view of the mechanisms of power and weakness at play in the Israeli art scene, and internal social systems that drive it.
 
It's amazing that painting can do all that. At the end of the day, painting envelopes everything within its boundaries. It contains, along the traditional, square platform, the political socio-geographical complexity of Israeli art and the complexities of the medium of painting itself. When Noy describes a group exhibition at the Tel Aviv central bus station, he paints the space, from all angles, just like pools were painted in Ancient Egypt. He plants a Picasso painting into Fainaru's exhibition, and the final painting in the series shows the main exhibition hall here at Haifa Museum of Art. The fictitious element of the painting and its power of containment appear as an inexhaustible source of vitality and renewal.

Born in Israel, 1972; lives and works in Haifa