R.V.O
Rakefet Viner Omer

I Will Never Forgive You

 

The Miron Sima Visual Arts Award, 2011

 

The Miron Sima Foundation in conjunction with the Artists' House, Jerusalem 

(Judges Committee : Amitai Mendelsohn, Galia Bar-Or, Alex Kremer)

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curator: Sagi Refael

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Rakefet Viner–Omer׳s solo exhibition, entitled “I Will Never Forgive You,“ was shown in Jerusalem following the artist׳s receipt of the 2011 Miron Sima Award.

The power of this exhibition׳s paintings lies in their intense honesty, seeping like colored sweat from the very depths of the canvas, and dripping from there to the surface and the spectators. Enigmatic figures, infantile in appearance, are drawn in gangly, rather scribbled, obsessive lines. A world of sexual aggression steeped in juicy aesthetics from the sewer or the basement of the psyche. Viner–Omer infiltrates forbidden territories; one could even say she overtly bursts

through anti–conventional boundaries as if they existed solely for the sake of being reformulated. She forges full steam ahead, to uproot another fenced–in area, to gain another foothold. Her paintings force themselves on the world, impolite and hard to swallow. They demand that the observer be fully alert, open to exploration and reevaluation. This is shameless painting that appropriately, manneristically consumes its own anger like a guitar being smashed at a rock concert.

Rakefet Viner–Omer also paints as revenge, turning the volume up high on long years of muteness. This is her space for taking action, and she oscillates back and forth between life and art. This kind of painting is “bad,“ of course, not just as a stylistic gesture, but rather by the intrusiveness inflaming the artist׳s vitality and freedom. It is also serious drawing, taking an ironic look at itself and at the world. Absurdly revealing and yet not completely decipherable, it increasingly dissolves in the direction

of abstraction, towards deconstructing the concept of presence, both in front of and behind the canvas