![\"Kafri3\"](\"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Kafri3.jpg\")
<\/a>Iva Kafri, “Solo Exhibition”, RawArt Gallery, Tel Aviv. Photo: I. Kafri. Courtesy of the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n
Prior to opening, Kafri worked for a month in the gallery, at the heart of the industrial area of southern Tel Aviv, bringing along with her what she had found outside: rolls of wallpaper and tapes and paint buckets and stickers and broken mirrors. The \u2018environment\u2019 here, in the very tradition of Kaprow and performance art, begins somewhere on the way to the allocated space for exhibiting art, where it actually never ends; the \u2018place\u2019 of Kafri\u2019s exhibition is only one register of indeterminacy she brings forth. Is this environmental art? The place from where Kafri draw her materials and images and that which she creates as a representation of the former are nearly the same place. Urban space produces urban matter that simulates urban space. Nothing is organic in her materials; nature, in the strict sense, is nowhere to be found. All plastic and metal and nylon and Perspex, and not as trash but as totally clean artificial matter, which highlights the only organic \u2018matter\u2019 here, namely, human movement. Evidently, the wallpapers and colored boards and spray-color on the floors all reflect the limits of the artist\u2019s body-movement in the gallery, during that month-long work, and the effort to reach beyond these limits. One twinkling paper-wrapped object is stuck to the ceiling of the gallery and can be better seen through its reflection in a broken mirror on the floor. The eye movement of the spectators is also challenged yet controled.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Iva Kafri, “Solo Exhibition”, RawArt Gallery, Tel Aviv. Photo: I. Kafri. Courtesy of the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
Color, too, which is the most striking quality of the whole piece, is not of the sort we usually find in that narratives of both environmental and conceptual art; Kafri\u2019s work is not fantastic or mystical or Poppy like Robert Rauschenberg’s or Yayoi Kusama\u2019s or Ian Davenport\u2019s\u00a0 or the earlier Neo-Dadaists. There is something quite brave about the honesty with which Kafri explains \u201cthe pure, initial passion to purple\u201d, for instance. On the other hand, unlike the spirituality of Rothko, Kafri seems to be primarily concerned with whatever happens outside painting and outside the painter. We then understand that for her, what is \u2018raw\u2019 about the materials and colors she stages around visitors in the gallery, is not to be found in the fact that these materials were taken up for artistic use prior to their transformation into finite products, but rather in the fact that by Kafri\u2019s performative visual articulation, these objects and materials demand that we perceive them beyond human-use-orientations and interests, that is, as mere color. These are not to be taken as \u2018readymade\u2019, as objects re-territorialized into the supposedly independent field of art and its institutions, but rather as what otherwise would still be the hidden ingredient that covers almost everything we touch in our everyday lives, the pigment.<\/p>\n