''How to figure your face?''

Text by Chris Cyrille, art critic, 2021

Reading note

Written in 2021, this critical text belongs to an earlier phase of Abraham Aronovitch’s work, marked by an exploration of the figure, the relationship to the other, and the notion of presence. It sheds light on the questions that traverse this period and anticipates the existential and introspective concerns later developed in the series Behind The Obvious.

Critical text

How to figure your face? How can one encounter oneself behind the reflection of representation?
Here, the you becomes a call — the call of the presence of the other, without whom no figure could truly exist. This you runs through all of Abraham Aronovitch’s paintings.

The artwork searches for itself, continues to experiment with materials and techniques. Yet the intention is already there — dormant, expectant, oscillating. What gradually emerges in Aronovitch’s work is an address: a movement toward a you, sometimes toward a we. To search beyond representation is not to seek the unveiling of a hidden truth, but to seek what is missing for the figure to fully become a figure — namely, you.

How, then, can we uproot the we? The we that frees us from chosen and exclusive solitudes; from borders that do not refract but oppose; from shores that raise walls instead of inviting drift; from cities that recognize themselves only through the reflection of a single, depthless face; from cynicisms that immobilize bodies still capable of hope.

Aronovitch appears to track this we through an art practice that listens. He pursues it within a condensation of encounters, where we might — perhaps — share a common ground, as in The Gift (2020). Perhaps this is a gesture toward our own rebirth: Reborn (2021).

We lack co-birth, this possibility of coming-into-being together, of infinitely coupling ourselves in order to escape the world as it is imposed upon us. Aronovitch’s work seeks to make us feel the intimacy of an encounter: between an open work and ourselves; between two bodies that falter into one another.

Ultimately, it is the presence of the loved one that matters — but how can it be rendered perceptible outside the grip of representational clichés? Everything depends on the means available to the artist to approach the figure — a figure that refuses to be confined or strangled by a representation that would seek only sameness.

We know that ready-made images erase the other, disfigure them until they become nothing more than a surface reflecting like a smooth screen. At that point, the other can be neutralized, struck, erased, reduced to an anonymous mass. Painting must therefore pursue the space where presence can escape — the fissure through which it might flee, where systems of capture momentarily forget themselves.

All my art will be to let you remain infinite.