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The series of portraits continues an abandoned series in which Harel drew figures from The Marker newspaper: people who stir, with a heavy hand, inside society. The current series is fictional. The figures are invented and pulled from the head into charcoal and paper. They are anonymous and human. They have no emotional expression. They are only here, in the exhibition. They are not a memory of someone who did something. No one knew them. When the exhibition ends, they will no longer be. They are embalmed in a temporary mausoleum, laminated in plastic wrap like a second skin, as temporary as cold, nameless flesh.
Total Map Projection
Pieces of land, scorched maps floating in heavenly blue. Harel uses a simple and improvised mechanical technique. He soots aluminum foil and prints it onto paper. In this way he assembles burnt, abandoned ground over a crystalline, clear landscape. The optical-tactile surface comes at the expense of the possibility of reading the map. Meaningless letters of cartographic structures. Life forms that might have existed there did not survive, or destroyed themselves. The environment becomes a living creature, even if it contained destruction. The map is a new animal. It may be a butterfly. The forms themselves are based on projections of the earth from the early and mid-twentieth century.
Large black paintings on paper. Harel makes a rapid gesture of laying down black paint and then, carefully and stubbornly, fills the remaining areas, leaving a thin white thread. An illuminated border. A resonance. In these drawings there is a struggle between concealments and blockages. The first black conceals parts of the white. Then a blockage prevents it from becoming completely wild over the remaining white. The blocker is itself blocked by the original black. The corona trapped between two blacks becomes a crack. A border between two large blacks. Like a solar eclipse, produced by two movements indifferent to one another.
Mirror One
elliptical work is shown in the exhibition. Compressed and flattened at the waist. There is a mechanical act of synthesis here. The mirror holds in its body an illusion of depth and place. This is a mirror that produces no reflection. Across the works there is also a sense of bureaucracy: black lists, open accounts, collapsing tables. All the existing data needed to produce order and meaning - but not here. Not now.