ARTICLES - מאמרים

Fake

Liora Kanterewicz's objects are monuments to desire. Desire for color, for contact, for a physical, emotional eroticism, for excitement. Desire to create a sensual, seductive fantasy, to stimulate the hand and the eye within a total visual celebration, charged with extravagance. The object – a construction of wood wrapped in a sealed carpet of colorful and banal plastic flowers – does indeed arouse an emotional response, like receiving a gift-wrapped present, one which is accessible and mysterious as it piques our curiosity. A prolonged encounter, however, mutes this initial gaiety. The excitement fades in the face of an article that conveys a sense of totality – a synthetic, lifeless industrial product.

Liora Kanterewicz's current works are points in a process of gradual metamorphosis in which the object loses its two-dimensional qualities and takes on volume until it comes off the wall and is set in space. The desire for color and erotic expressivity, which has always characterized the artist's work, has intensified and become increasingly stylized. Colorful and textured surfaces retain painterly characteristics, and the emphasis on the artificiality of the object (its raw materials and stylized geometric shapes) is revealed as the main subject of the work. Alongside the modest and bony underlying structure, the carpet of flowers creates a sensuousness and lavishness in an unambiguous artistic statement that binds the basic form and color.

Kanterewicz brings the physical and the external into question. She is guided by a primary and authentic instinct that joins art and life – life which, in her childhood, was marked by a deep sense of curiosity and a desire for adventure, in an environment where resourcefulness and physical labor played a central role.

In her work she aspires to visual communication with the viewer. She takes us through the material and chromatic richness, the simplicity of form, and the spell of fantasy to connect with the physical and the erotic, but to feel as well, in the end, the burden of craft that has become an obsession, and glamour that has come to constrain.

Yifat Ben Natan