Assaf Romano: From the Land of Splendor and Dismay

Assaf Romano’s (b. 1964, Acre, Israel; lives and works in Har Halutz community) painting is committed to the human, which is unsettled when the ever so familiar and clear becomes vague and blurred. Romano—who began his career in photography, but has since the 1990s shifted his focus to painting—presents paintings and drawings, made partly from direct observation and partly from photographs and photographic images taken from films and the Internet. The works are tied to the here-and-now, and yet, in their palpable tension between closeness and distance, they contain a dreamy, intangible quality. Ostensibly naturalistic images of animals and plants are juxtaposed with human representations, reminding us that the gaze itself seeks to hold on to the transient, not in order to immortalize it, but to acknowledge its instability.

“Land of Splendor” (or “glorious land,” as it is referred to in some Bible translations)—Heb. eretz tsvi—the name given to the Land of Israel in the Book of Daniel, is derived from the Semitic root ts-v-i (צ-ב-י) denoting desire, a yearning for the good. This is the origin of the biblical use of the word tsvi in the sense of splendor, beauty, and glory. The Sages further linked the “Land of Splendor” to the animal by that name, tsvi, common locally. “Land of Splendor” thus became a charged term referring to a landscape or terrain imbued with ideological, affiliative, and identity-related meanings, and at the same time associated with wars and sacrifice: “The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!” (2 Samuel 1:19)—as per David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan. The prefix “from” in the exhibition’s title—”From the Land of Splendor and Dismay”—casts it as an ancient epistle, a message signaling imminent danger or an echo carried from the past into the present.

The painting Extinct Deer is based on a photograph taken by Romano, documenting a failed attempt to reintroduce a deer to the wild. The animal appears within a circle, recalling a view through binoculars or a camera lens, perhaps a shooting target. The circle functions as a boundary and a frame: on the one hand, it focuses and narrows the gaze; on the other, it charges the image with a double meaning of affection and prey, attraction and threat. The circle signifies not only a technology of seeing; it is also a symbol of enclosure, and at times of inner vision—a circle through which the animal looks back at us, as if we were, in fact, the objects of the gaze.

In the drawing Gazelles, the delicate lines tracing the pair of animals looking at us emphasize their fragile existence, the panic typical of their behavior in nature. In Wild Donkey (Female Equus Hemionus), the way the animal is rendered lends it a near-mystical, otherworldly presence, as its skin seems transparent, refined in a lustrous light to the point of disintegration, echoing the configuration of the stones on which it stands. The painting Wild Desert Hare carries the memory of Albrecht Dürer’s famed Young Hare (1502), yet here the hare stands upright, as if on guard, alert to danger, set against an abstract, dreamlike background. In the drawing Preyed-Upon Hare, an animal corpse lies before us, evidence of a death threat fulfilled.

During his year as artist-in-residence at Oranim College, Romano drew and painted in the College’s nature and taxidermy rooms, and the inspiration for the weed drawings arose during his wanderings in the vicinity of Mount Halutz. Drawing the worlds of flora and fauna is deeply rooted in the tradition of local art. From the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the early days of statehood, depictions of indigenous flora and fauna played a central role in shaping the image of the land—scientifically, nationally, and aesthetically. Romano engages in a dialogue with this tradition, but, like other artists, he also disrupts it, infusing it with unrest. He chooses to depict “weeds”—”marginal” plants—at times also vegetal forms of his own invention, surreal in character. The birds he selects—common species, some local, some migratory—are portrayed in their fragility, so that even the crow appears shy and withdrawn.

Flickering between them are metaphorical drawings of human figures in states of distress and terror: a woman wailing; a naked woman dancing with a shadow figure; a woman bent over, looking not into water but at a black stain; a Woman Fleeing from the Darkness Clinging to Her Heels, as the title indicates; or a figure of an “agent” staring at a window which is not an opening onto the outside, but a dark, all-consuming drawing surface. Painting and drawing, like a metronome of existence, oscillate between testimony and effacement, between an inquisitive gaze and one that absorbs a wound. The exhibition traces the gaze as it begins to crack. The subversion of the image, amid the fissures, allows dismay to surface.