Three artists, three questions: Recurring motifs through chaos and order

Their works are infused with color, light, music, and recurring motifs. They all expressed their intentionality in their artistic endeavors and explorations as they answered my three questions:

1. What inspires you?

3. What makes your artwork different from that of other artists?

Ariel Hacohen was born in 1993 in Jerusalem, where he has been based until now. In his work, he experiments with a variety of photographic approaches, such as snapshot and staged photography, digital image processing, and video art.

Hacohen’s oeuvre focuses on the interface among archaeology, history, memory, and the human body. He blends classical components of cultural heritage with a modern approach, techniques, and materials that have undergone digitization, blurring, erasure, and replication.

As he told the Magazine, he creates images, videos, and sculptures that appear both multi-temporal and timeless. His photographic sculptures use computer-based modeling and casting techniques. Interestingly, he uses himself as a tool, acting and modeling in his works.

His works have been presented in several exhibitions. Currently on view is Posting (Stonehenge on Rainy Day) at the group exhibition Desktop: Physical Exhibition about the Digital Era at the Haifa Museum of Art; and his solo show, a seven-minute looped video installation, By the Rivers, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

“There is a musical segment that echoes cycles of time, from the Babylonian exile, through Italy in the 19th and 20th centuries, to the meanings I give it today, after two years of a terrible war in this place,” he said. “This is the iconic ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ from Verdi’s opera Nabucco. I hope that while watching the work, these charged histories can rise to the surface.”

Despite the dramatic insight contained in Verdi’s music, combined with the repetitive visual elements and the reappearance of the young man with the steely gaze (Hacohen himself), I found this work comforting.

“Aesthetically, I am deeply influenced by archaeology and art history – this longing for objects that have survived time, and the attempt to extract a story from layers of time, to find meaning in dusty fragments of civilizations that once existed.

“Archaeology is deeply intertwined with our ability to imagine. Also, it reflects the desire to preserve something that has almost disappeared from the world, to restore its presence, and to build memory from it, as a window into another time.

“Like in archaeology, often my photographic works are built digitally from thousands of layers. At first glance, only the surface appears, but upon a closer look, I hope one can sense an accumulation of time.”

“Art, in my view, is anything with a visual presence created by a human not for a functional purpose but to evoke emotion and thought, and to help us understand ourselves and our relationship to the world.

“We are so flooded with images today that we often become numb to them. Art offers a certain distance from reality, a space that maintains a connection to the world but is far enough to allow us to contemplate openly and freely, and perhaps gain a different perspective.

“Art does not have to be beautiful. It can also be ugly. But it must have an aesthetic presence, meaning that it engages with questions of visibility, representation, and our relationship to reality. For me, good art is art that makes you feel, that moves you, that shifts your point of view, and helps you look at and endure what you cannot bear on your own.”

“I deliberately allow contradictory dynamics to coexist, much like our experience of reality itself, which contains contradictions and parallel, conflicting forces. I am often asked whether my current installation at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art is optimistic or pessimistic about our future here. I prefer to leave this question to the viewer because I believe the work strongly expresses both.

“Ultimately, it is identity-based and emotional experiences that activate me and guide my eyes and my aesthetic sensitivity, the point of view from which the works emerge. My art reflects who I am and the specific place I come from. It moves along axes of the secular and the sacred, the individual and the collective, masculinity and femininity, existentialism and absurdity.”

https://www.instagram.com/ariel_hacohen

Jessica Moritz, a French-Israeli artist, was born in Paris in 1982 and moved to Tel Aviv in 2016, where she has been living and working. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) in Paris in 2009, having previously won honors, including the LVMH Young Artist Award (2006) and the Takasago Prize (2008). In 2023, she received a scholarship from the Culture Ministry.

A hallmark of Moritz’s work is the exploration of geometric, abstract shapes in various forms of repetition, inspired by light and color. Her works employ optical illusions; she often creates paintings in unique shapes.

“I use or build a classic frame, and then I twist it,” she said.

She elaborated about her work process: “In three-dimensional works, I sketch everything, shape, then compose, and lastly [add] colors. I create a pattern, just like for fashion or graffiti, to try to see if the volume can happen. Then comes the tricky part of stretching the canvas, getting it to rest, and painting. And I hope the magic happens, and sometimes it does.”

Her works immerse the viewer in a meditative space; some of them have an almost hypnotic effect. Light plays a key role in her work, serving as both medium and muse.

Moritz explores “the infinite evolution of color, elusive moments of grace, and interactions with architectural forms.” In her work, she translates these reflections into shapes, lines, and harmonious color palettes, creating “mindscapes” that reveal impossible geometries.

Her work has been featured in several group exhibitions. When I first saw her Whisper between Waves, in pigments and acrylic on curved canvas structure, in the 2024 group exhibition Mute Poetry in Tel Aviv, I found it very refreshing. It stayed on my mind.

On December 18, Moritz opened her first solo exhibition in Israel, Light Ripples, at the Wertheimer Gallery in Tel Aviv. In this new show, she reclaims recycled materials – wood, denim, and textiles – transforming them into three-dimensional paintings that defy depth and flatness.

“I translate my vision into a harmonious illusion. Light gives me these infinite resources to create and evolve through the different cycles,” she explained. “The show reflects on the many stages of what I have experienced, witnessed, and want to leave traces.”

Her artistic philosophy concentrates on finding order in chaos, seeking balance, and creating shapes derived from these experiences.

“Light is my first influence; how it interacts with my surroundings. It can be architecture, people, or a piece of sky, and then it shifts a shape within.

“Living in Tel Aviv for the last 10 years, I also find inspiration in the city’s architecture, which still bears the traces of the Bauhaus movement. My practice is also inspired by Bauhaus artists, particularly Josef Albers, whose theories of color deeply resonate with my approach.”

“Art, to me, is the effort of creating something to share an emotion or a dialogue with purpose. The shape or form doesn’t really matter; it’s what and how we manage to make it concrete for others.”

“My art is raw and personal, but it also reflects society and evolution, keeping the grace and flaws that I hope people can relate to. It may open new perspectives for people willing to see.

“I am committed to sustainability, and I embrace eco-conscious practices in my art-making. I reclaim and repurpose materials collected during my travels, transforming them into new forms through an alchemical process. By prioritizing reuse over consumption, I challenge the norms of senseless consumerism, striving to create art with purpose and responsibility.”

Born in Haifa in 1947, Dan Marcello Zehavi has been living there ever since. He connects the worlds of science and art. He graduated from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology with an MA in physics in 1971; that same year, he had his first solo exhibition in Haifa’s Beit Aba Hushi.

A self-taught artist, he has a style that features repetitive geometric works. They are so detailed and precise, that they are reminiscent of print; however, they are all handmade. In his art, he refers to the times when engineers and architects designed exclusively by hand, an era before digital printers and photocopiers, and long before the age of artificial intelligence.

In 1979 and 1982, after he completed his military service and was working as an engineer, he exhibited in art biennales of young artists at the Haifa Museum of Art.

“The museum purchased one of my works, Poldark,” he said. “It was a geometric repetitive work, showing 100 nights in a high-rise neighborhood, and every seventh night, all those people watched a very popular TV series in the 1970s called Poldark.”

Zehavi noted that his style hasn’t changed much in 40 years, as he took a break from art for 30 years, dedicating himself to his engineering career. But upon retirement, he returned to making art, inspired by the 2016 Metropolis exhibition at the Haifa Museum of Art, which re-presented his work Poldark. He then realized how much he missed creating art.

Over the past decade, he has participated in workshops on various printing and drawing techniques, and presented his work at the 2024 Fresh Paint art fair, and had several solo exhibitions in Israel.

In his latest exhibition, Inkjet, at the Nuzha Gallery at Beit Italia Center in Jaffa, Zehavi presents works from the past two years, in acrylic pens on paper, canvas, and gessoed wood boards. He mimics digital printing techniques, line by line, as a mechanical action.

“I try to find my moment of kunz, in the sense of trick, which turns into kunst [“art,” in German],” he explained.

“I am being inspired by everything I experience through all my senses and brain: daily events, scientific education, weather, physical feelings, seasons, emotions, words, slogans, politics, views, other artists’ works and biographies, including visual art, poems, novels, music, films, the beauty of mathematics, beauty in general, the mystery of nature, and the laws of physics – all these inspire me.

“I am very interested in order – and it’s easy to turn into disorder – and when this disorder depicts some beauty and interest.”

“I call ‘art’ the things people do when they raise my emotions, challenge my thoughts, and interest me for more than one glance.

“I call art the endless solitude and sadness that Munch’s works evoke in me, the beauty and wisdom in the improvisations of Kandinsky, the beauty and calmness in Agnes Martin works, the humor in Klee, Miro, and Rafi Lavie works, the beauty and the easiness of drawing in Modigliani’s Caryatides, the power in Dorchin’s sculptures and the eroticism in some of them, the emotions Aviva Uri delivers in her drawings, the ‘going until the end,’ and the exactness in Michael Gross’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures.”

“My work is generally geometrical, tends to be minimal, repetitive in a way that I haven’t seen in other artists’ works. I constrain myself to [standard] paper size and formats.

“My attraction to mathematics and science affects my work, as well as my curiosity regarding order and disorder. I usually start with a very organized grid, which in the drawing process disappears and is transformed into the work’s subject.

“I let different algorithms create my works while working, and I see the intermediate, sometimes unexpected results. In this way, I can turn grids into building facades, broken buildings, sea waves, and more.

“Four years ago, I began my largest series of drawings called Blueprints, in which I imitated an old copying technique using only blue Canson papers [half or full sheet of standard paper size]. These drawings imitate engineers’ sketches, including the relevant dimensions in millimeters.”

https://www.instagram.com/zehavi1247