Artspace Tel Aviv | עמותת 'מקום לאמנות' בקרית המלאכה

The Lord of the Forest 

Amalia Rubin 

 Curators: Assaf Rahat  

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Amalia Rubin is a figurative and colorist painter, with a unique textural/material sensitivity to the surface of the canvas and the brushwork that is done on it. The scenes and interactions that take place between the animal figures, and the hybrid monsters invented in her paintings, take place in a fantastic and liminal nature-like space of hallucination, between life and death, a stage of transformation, as described by Dror Burstein in his book The Benefit of the Birds (2010). This is a transformation of the prehistorical hunter artist seen in the 17,000-year-old wall paintings in the Lascaux cave in France, a painting that is essentially timeless.

This is how Dror Burstein describes the historic scene from that mural in his book: The man threw his spear at the bison, which was wounded but not killed. The bison managed to hit the man and knock him down.... he killed him or mortally wounded him...... It is possible that the moment we see is a moment of transformation - a moment when the man symbolically becomes a bird. His face lengthens, his mouth acquires a beak, and his hands are spread out....... From this perspective, the bird is symbolic, not real - it is a symbolic description of the near future of the dead man.... The bird turns away from the man because it is not there "really". .... She is close, but not part of the happening. She is on another imagined and symbolic plane. Only the artist sees it...... One hand of the man turns to the animal that killed him in the recent past and the other hand turns to the symbol, to the bird that is his near future. In fact, he is already spreading his arms to fly. He who was closer to a mammal, the bison, is now at the stage where he "crosses sides" and becomes closer to a bird. In his legs he still resembles an animal but, in his hands, he is almost a bird.... and perhaps this is the essence of the painting: a description of the "passing of the soul". A Hebrew expression that, beautifully expresses the subject of the painting. It can also be seen as the earliest description of a winged person, who in the distant future will be called an "angel".

Following the thoughts dealing with the state between existence and death, in "The Lord of the Forest", (Erlkönig) a German ballad by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which was written in 1782, it tells a story about a ride on a horse in the night, of a father and son in a dark forest, which is ruled by a figure of a demonic trickster called Erlkönig - the Lord of the Forest, who Only the child sees, doubt in his imagination, or in reality. The child is threatened by the creature and asks for the father's help to save him, the father tries with all his thought and logic to calm him down with rational explanations but was unsuccessful. The father increases the gallop of his horse to help his child escape from his hallucinations (or perhaps from the realistic horror) but fails and in the end his son dies in his arms.

One interpretation offered for this ballad is a strong struggle between two schools from that period: rationalism versus romanticism, the father who represents the rational concept, and in contrast the son who represents romance, the limit man must grasp with his intellect the power and depth of nature and the universe around him. In this allegory the romantic view wins but it has a heavy price in the death of the son, like the death of that ancient hunter, who became a bird/angel.

In both works, the description of the path to death is related to the transition from reality to hallucination - to the world of imagination and creativity. Rubin's paintings refer to moments of transformation. they look as if they were taken from a romantic, ancient, primeval world, where the hand and foot of an actual person is not visible, or alternatively a post-apocalyptic futuristic world in which man no longer exists. For her, the painting is a place of twilight, a state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep, between life and death, the place of dreams. A place where winged animals and different hybrid species of animals live together. Like Hieronymus Bosch's famous fantastic triptych painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which deals with the creation of man, heaven and hell, but in contrast - in Rubin's painting, their psychological representations are all together on the same pictorial substrate, without separation

Didier Anzieu published an article in 1974 under the title "Skin-Ego", he pointed out that the skin is the shell of the body similar to the ego, which strives to envelop the mechanism of the soul. The skin self emerges as a concept that clarifies how the self-rests on the skin, paralleling the functions of both. The assumption is that the self, like the skin, is built as a contact surface and thus enriches concepts such as a border, the field of inclusion, perspective. Following his theory, Rubin's paintings are like a connection between animistic mystic, and the inner light which is wrapped in an outer skin. The inner light is depicted in Rubin's paintings in many and varied ways and it appears under the mantle of color and texture in bright tones, sometimes warm and sometimes cold and phosphorescent, as a possibility of mental/spiritual revelation which finds its way as a beastly/bird/hybrid configuration. The inner light that emerges from the depths of her paintings illuminates a world of wild nature. The light is like the erupting vapor that flashes out and is restricted by the skin, the epidermis, the plants and the animals, a story that outlines a path and casts a form and a gestalt, into a liquid state, a state of a delirious and dreaming mind.

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1. Anisia, d. The "Skin-Ego", Toulat Book Publishing, translated by Orit Rosen, 2004

 2. Burstein, d. For the benefit of the birds Yedioth Ahronoth 2010