Shony Rivnay’s solo exhibition presents a series of large-scale paintings created between 2021 and 2024. Spanning the period between the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and the outbreak of the Swords of Iron war, these years have been marked by social isolation, crisis and an enduring sense of danger. Against the weight of this historical moment, Rivnay’s paintings appear as suspended images of an unresolved struggle.
At the same time, they are remarkably vital on a formal level. Their visual energy emerges from a dense network of collisions and interactions between opposing forces that continually threaten to cancel one another out. The paintings unfold as complex systems of mutual influence, where disappearance and emergence, destruction and renewal, growth and decay take place simultaneously.
Working without figuration, Rivnay embraces one of abstraction’s enduring challenges: its openness to countless interpretations. Yet alongside this openness, the paintings raise another question—what anchors abstract painting in its own time and place? What makes it specific to the present?
Seen together, the works form a continuous landscape without a horizon. The viewer is invited to ask whether the gaze they propose passes through a telescope or a microscope. Their visual language shifts between the cosmic and the cellular, between immense scales and microscopic structures, without ever settling into a single reading.
The DNA-like forms that seem to await discovery within the paintings ultimately return them to the here and now—to the physical and mental reality of place, and to the ongoing experience of conflict. The Place Will Summon Us suggests that place is not merely a setting but an active force that shapes perception itself, drawing us back to the fragile, unresolved conditions of the present.
Curator: Avshalom Suliman
