Distant Light / Lior Gal
15 March - 04 May 2019
Lior Gal overturns the forces of gravity and creates landscapes that stand outside space-time, still unexplored.
In his large-scale black-and-white photographic collages, Lior Gal superimposes two images whose line of contact then morphs into a horizon line. The artist overturns the forces of gravity and creates landscapes that stand outside space-time, still unexplored. Natural earthly objects and George Lucas-style deserts unite in sci-fi, almost futuristic constructions. This provides a strange contrast to the process behind the creation of his images: the use of vintage cameras, analogue photography, and development in the darkroom, avoiding any form of digital production and post-production.
His development work is ultimately almost as pictorial as that of a painter wielding a brush. It offers the viewer an incredible palette of black, dark grey, ochre grey, white, off-white, and silvery-white thanks to the mixture of light, paper, and shutter speed. The modesty of the technique and the immediate sensitivity of his images combine to make his work so surprising and powerful. We feel we have somehow already glimpsed these universes somewhere in the depths of our dreams and our imagination. Lior Gal sees nature not as a whole, but as singular fragments which he records, through his photography, and then juxtaposes, as collages, to create a different image, outside the real world. This has the effect for the viewer of creating the paradoxical feeling of being brought face to face with something that is at the same time both familiar and unknown.