An established artist and a Lecturer at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Kashi is a highly accomplished painter who works in two seemingly unrelated but easily recognizable styles. His oils and acrylics on canvas are either highly detailed paintings of thickets, plants and fields, or entirely abstract paintings characterized by the qualities of openness and emptiness. Kashi's thickets, or field paintings, speak of the overwhelming effect of "nature," and offer a 21st-Century interpretation of romantic notions like David Kaspar Friedrich's thematic treatment of the tiny human being facing the immensity of the natural world. The open, abstract paintings, meanwhile, suggest what could be described as the reverse, a kind of "horror vaccui." But both sets actually offer viewers rich meditative possibilities. And once such a meditative view is applied to these paintings, the options of density and blankness reemerge as much closer to one another than it may first appear.
Artist's Book 2006
Produced for the solo exhibition Chronos at the Noga Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2006, Kashi's book offers a personally chosen retrospective of his oeuvre. Like the work itself, the book is an invitation to contemplation. Seen together, these paintings require and produce a time-consuming dialogue. The work slows us down, requires us to enter it, lose ourselves in it, and then find ourselves anew.
