ArtGuards | Evgeny Merman

This is Evgeny Merman’s second and most comprehensive solo exhibition in Israel, since returning to it after two decades of absence.

The exhibition turns the spotlight on the almost transparent partners in any museum – the guards, a kind of absentee present in the exhibition space whose presence is revealed only as soon as order is disturbed: a camera flash, an unwanted touch on the artwork they are entrusted with, dangerous physical proximity, and so on. But what does the exhibition or display look like from their point of view? What relationship develops between the guards and the works over the weeks and months in which they stay together in the same defined space? What happens to the aura of the work of art that Walter Benjamin spoke of, in the eyes of the guards over time? And what do almost all the museum guards in the world have in common? Merman tries to decipher these riddles, as well as deal with substantive questions concerning the very act of painting, in a body of paintings in which the guards or their empty chairs are the main protagonists (or anti-heroes), while the works of art only peek out from behind as sub-protagonists.

Merman's approach creates expressive and colorful pictorial compositions in which the figure of the guard, in whole or in part, occupies a significant part of the painting, while hinting to modern and contemporary works in the history of art. The painting highlights the body language and expression of the characters without going into a detailed description, just brush strokes, stain upon stain, in gestures ranging from French modernism to German and American expressionism. In the process, melancholic, lonely and gray figures appear, who do not interact with the visitors or with the works of art. Bringing the guards to the front of the stage, in Merman's paintings, is seemingly contrary to the way they perceive themselves, or the instructions which they follow, in an attempt perhaps to resolve the dissonance between their appearance and the emotionally moving works of art. The empty chair, itself a kind of artistic icon (to which Prof. Motti Omer dedicated a comprehensive exhibition at the Tel Aviv University Gallery at the time), stars alone in quite a few works in the series, a fact that symbolically emphasizes the non-visibility of the guards. In other works, the presence of the guard is replaced by an amorphous paint stain, paint thrown on the canvas and dripping on it, perhaps a tribute to American action painting. Other identified homages in Merman's paintings are to Francis Bacon, in the way some of the guards’ faces are painted/spread, and to masterpieces such as Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker" or a girl reading a book, a recurring motif in art history.

Curator: Ilan Wizgan