Raz Gomeh
October 6 – December 3, 2011
« A linguistic system is a series of differences of sounds combined with a series of
differences of ideas ».
Ferdinand de Saussure
« If unconscious activity of the spirit consists in imposing forms to content, and if these
forms are fundamentally the same for all spirits, ancient and modern, primitive and civilized,
just as the study of symbolical function, one needs and it suffices to reach the underlying
unconscious structure present in each institution and in each custom, to reach a ground for
interpretation valid for all institutions and all customs. »
Claude Lévi-Strauss
On that hectic afternoon, just hours before the grand opening of the gallery with a solo exhibition by
Raz Gomeh, R.P., a young journalist writing for an Israeli newspaper called me one last time as part of
her effort to confirm a remaining detail on her list of facts to check: “Am I getting this right and the
exhibition indeed doesn’t have a title..?”
Running the risk of seeming anachronistic or dated, anchoring Raz Gomeh’s new body of work into the
realm of structuralism, and seeing it through the scope of this school of thought seems to find
justification on several levels.
First and foremost, by avoiding giving titles both to the works in the exhibition and to the exhibition
itself, Gomeh deliberately abstracts his production from the verbal sphere in an obvious aim at placing
the works within the realm of the sensitive, the innate, the unaffected and distancing it from the heavily
signified realm of language. This constitutes, in my opinion, a first element of reading that strongly
resonates with concepts of structuralist kind.
As first posited by Ferdinand de Saussure in the late XIXth century, structuralism found its first terrain of
exploration in the field of linguistics. Refraining from going too deep into a largely exploited and written
about discipline, Saussure’s legacy essentially sets grounds for a systemic understanding of language in
which individual semantic elements are to be understood as relative to each other and in opposition to
each other. While this theory was initially applied to language, Saussure’s concepts largely bled into other
theoretical and cultural fields such as literature, art, and architecture. It also affected social and cultural
anthropology as theorized by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
In this latter field, societal structure is apprehended as an entity of internal dependencies where
individuals build their identity based on that of the people they interact with. This second angle of
structuralist reading proves particularly relevant to Gomeh’s current body of work in the sense that his
objects - sculptures one might say - are personal, yet open-ended enough to set ground for grasping of a
kind that transcends the artist’s own social and personal stance.
Drawing from childhood memories of time spent in the environment of his grand parents’ house, the
artist abstracts elements of his visual memory – namely of typical Israeli household furnishings - into a
indexical system that he subsequently reconfigures into a highly evocative formal vocabulary. This
strategy is similar to that of the early minimalists who wanted to achieve a simultaneous relation between
the body’s internal space, the mind and the environment. In stripping the material - wood, glass, metal -
from any kind of affect or emotional charge, Gomeh avoids the slippery track of sentimental revival,
hence circumscribing de facto a hazardous potential for nostalgia, which would drastically restrict the
potential of the works for collective impact. By resisting the fetishizing of objects from the past and rather
placing his visual thinking on the level of analytical, opinionated research, Gomeh proposes a highly
processed personal reading of the influence of his early visual environment on the mark up of his own
memories.
Aside from Israeli interior design from the 1950’s, another formal inspiration for one of the two sculptural
objects currently presented - a semi free-standing room divider connected to a wall on one of its sides and
roughly positioned in the center of the exhibition space - came from the architecture of the former
Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia building in Prague. Designed by Karel Prager and completed in 1974,
the imposing construction is well representative of late brutalist architecture. With an elevated core
supported by two large pillars and what seems to be “a building supporting the building”, the main
structure is complete with repetitive window patterns made of bronze-colored metal and reflective glass.
These two formal elements certainly constitute a point of entry into Gomeh’s current exhibition. Entering
the gallery space, the visitor faces the sculpture extending perpendicularly from the wall and into the
space. As authoritarian looking as the Czech Assembly building was originally rendered, Gomeh’s
sculpture on the other hand has been afflicted with several devices of rupture that set forth both its
intrinsic structure of formal integrity and bring in an element of what one might term self-organized
criticality. In this regard, and for as much as the work is a room divider - imposing upon the visitor a
particular deviation throughout the gallery space - the main wood platform is also structurally divided by
a metal and semi-reflective glass frame while it is, and it is of utmost importance, simultaneously
supported by it.
Gomeh’s use of semi-reflective glass links the sculpture to the well-known tactics of minimalist practices
of the late 1960’s and 1970’s as exemplified by the work of Dan Graham. The latter used the material by
means of pointing out the rhetorical apparatus it constituted in International Style skyscrapers – namely
capitalist office buildings - and stated that the apparent visual opening actually hides the one-way
opaqueness of the mechanisms of power that are concealed behind the facades, thus generating different
gazes between those who are watching from the outside and those who are inside. Gomeh’s choice of
material seems indeed rooted in a desire to control this sort of power as well. By depriving the viewer
from visual information (what is behind the sculpture) and replacing this data by his or her own
representation, Gomeh fully enacts the asymmetry of the construction, resulting in a conceptual
unbalance – truly a dystopian consideration on the artist’s part - that is further reflected in the formal
structure of the sculpture.
On its backside, the piece is executed with a much rougher, “work in progress” feel. There, the glass
panels are simply see-through and the surrounding wood elements, devoid of a polished finish are also
much looser in structural terms. A wood plank - a screen of sorts - is mounted onto a sliding track that
opens a potential for lateral, yet restricted movement. By seemingly revealing what one could call the
antechamber of the construction (an early stage or unfinished version of the front side), Gomeh places a
particular stress on the performative aspect of assembling the sculpture.
Performance and the importance of the body action is also a very central aspect to the second sculptural
object presented in the exhibition. Applying black ink on glass, the artist reproduces vegetal details based
on illustrations found in XIXth century books depicting local sceneries from Palestinian times.
Interestingly, the graphic motifs are delineated by two intersecting circular shapes resulting from the
artist’s own movement, namely that of his extended arm circumventing the drawing space. In so
encapsulating the familiar graphic elements, Gomeh inscribes them in a performative frame and binds
their physical expansion to the dimensions of his own proportions. This restrictive strategy is further
developed through the overall structure of the piece. With the two symmetrical supporting wood tracks –
the actual medium for potential movement – interrupted by the gallery walls, Gomeh constricts the
sculpture to the physical characteristics of the exhibition space. Sealing a close conceptual relationship
with the room divider sculpture, this formal choice activates a possibility “guided reconfiguration”.
In an ongoing effort to balance the poetic with the mass-produced and the personal with the collective,
the loose and organic feel of the ink drawing comes in sharp contrast with the medium used: five
disconnected vertical, equally-sized glass panels positioned within tracks incised in the framing wood
elements. With both pieces, Gomeh creates works that encompass their own catalyst, indexical record,
and conceptual product.
Lastly, the third piece in the exhibition appears as an element through which to read both other works;
holding its own wall, the framed photograph depicts a motif shot earlier in the artist’s practice, namely
some six years prior to the mounting of the current exhibition. The arrangement, a studio shot of a typical
1960’s plastic milk bottle used as a vase for artificial flowers and placed against a neutral gray backdrop
conveys an acute sense of irony and humor. This glamorized depiction of Israeli kitsch rendered in the
fashion of commercial photography inscribes Gomeh’s stance within the realm of a skeptical approach to
aesthetic forms in regards their potential for sentimental recuperation and for triggering nostalgia.
Guillaume Rouchon
Tel Aviv, October 2011
