Nadav Weissman: A Rupture in Time

Mixed media, video, and animation

A continent split open, its fragments scattered overturned. Some rise like monoliths, others drift in solitude, and yet others sketch mountains and a horizon: perhaps this is an image of a world that once was and has since collapsed, a world in which we search for footholds; perhaps it never existed at all, and we now witness its emergence, taking part as it takes shape. Nadav Weissman’s sculptural installation consists of structured layers that seem to live and breathe autonomously, in a movement of revelation and concealment without beginning or end; a continuum that denies the possibility of serene, detached observation. Time and again, the flow collides with monumental

fragments, tectonic ruptures resembling architectural cross-sections.

Weissman saws, extracts, exposes, and delineates spaces and stairways from plywood surfaces—longitudinal and latitudinal lines that intermittently emerge and vanish through vertical and horizontal movements, transitions, contortions,  and illusory perspectives. He draws in graphite, projects video, propels animation. All these elements fleetingly coalesce into a surface resembling one painterly façade, only to scatter again, leaving behind the memory of their own formation as sediments of time, an archaeology of forms and materials.

The landscape before us bears traces of a seismic event, a visual occurrence dense with recognizable signifiers, pointing toward other, latent meanings: an allegorical vision of a body made of forms imbued with symbolic meanings and values; a body-landscape whose organs are scattered, its formal, emotional-psychological interpretations disrupted. A landscape that unfolds the gap between the overt and covert, the loss of connection between signifier and signified. Instead, Weissman proposes an open ended mode, where only segments of insight and partial truths may be grasped. There is no single, redemptive or consoling exegetic ground, but an accumulated multiplicity that invites new associations and contexts.

The installation’s title, A Rupture in Time, evokes its inherent duality, the ways in which form and consciousness come together and break apart within it. At the same time, it gestures toward Weissman’s dialogue with Moshe Kupferman’s painting cycle The Rift in Time (Di Kriye, 1999), created for Yad Layeled, the Children’s Memorial Museum at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in his Kibbutz—one of Kupferman’s rare direct responses to the Holocaust—and with his scroll works, created through a sequence of back-and-forth, left and-right painterly gestures on both sides of the paper. Kupferman’s abstract painting emerges through cumulative acts of construction and erasure, layering and obstruction. It is a painting that resists representation, born of an internal-artistic dialogue, but at the same time, conveys a psychological existential sense of rupture and trauma.

Over the past decade, Weissman’s work has been marked by processes of sculpture-relief drawing, combining video and animation and exploring the relationship between landscape, nature, and body, grounded in the tension between continuity and fragmentation, and a demand for the viewer’s constant approaching and receding motion. In his current exhibition, Weissman introduces an additional layer: a dialogue with Kupferman’s two-dimensionality,

transforming its depths into sculptural, tactile three-dimensionality, and its grid of paint layers and brush or pencil movements into sculpture, sawing, and graphite drawing on wood. Each part of the installation seems to give rise to the next, echoing what Kupferman called “sequencing.”

An animated fish-like form, carrying Kupferman’s hallmark in its longitudinal lines, traverses and scans the surface, emerging from and submerging back into the layers, unfurling them into sculptural concreteness, marking and amplifying its “scenic” quality. The form’s movement through space emphasizes duration, charting the story of the landscape as an architectural-geometric formation that is deconstructed, losing its grasp. At the same time, the animation of the abstract painterliness reaffirms the autonomy of the artistic act, its detachment from the representation of reality, its self-reference steeped in both gravity and humor. Weissman orchestrates a wandering amid fragments and sequences, between the entrances and exits, where the viewer’s body becomes part of the occurrence, aware that his vision is steered below and above the surface, into the depths and fractures, and toward the openings, in an archaeology of strata turned nature.

We are confronted with an abstracted landscape image, which is also a meditation on landscape and on the ways in which concepts of nature, history, and vision are shaped by social and cultural (largely masculine) conditioning tied to power and control. Weissman’s continent, like the legendary Atlantis that, according to Plato, was destroyed and lost due to the wickedness of its people, holds both the beauty of its form and its void, presence and absence, a field laden with analogies and images that generate a parallel world. Weissman severs immediate reciprocity with reality, time, and place, through an art that reflects on itself and its origins, its modi operandi and ways of formation, the relations between part and whole. He brings to the fore the subconscious of the forms, embodying rupture as cultural and historical, personal and collective memory.

Video-animation, mapping, and
editing: Amit Matalon
Object lighting and
programming: Tamar Or
AI-based image-to-motion
processing: Tal Nisim
Thanks: Yuri Katz,
Nira Itzhaki and
Chelouche Gallery for
Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv
Special thanks: Irit Tamari,
Ilana Laor, Tal Shoshan
The exhibition is supported by:
The Israel Lottery Council
for Culture & Arts