Doron Rabina
5/07

Previous / Next Artist
Rabina is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with painting and photography as well as installations, and also functions as a curator. He represented Israel at the 26th Sao Paulo Biennale, 2004, and in 2005 and 2006 was the chosen curator of the Reading Power Station annual show of contemporary Israeli art. He teaches art at the Beit-Berl College - Midrasha School of Art, and is the curator of the college's gallery, The Midrasha, in Tel Aviv. For one of his signature works, shown at Sao Paulo, Rabina spread what looked like expensive glass crystals on the gallery floor next to the shining headlights of a car. The sense of dangerous shattering was undercut when the viewer moved closer, and found that what appeared to be crystals were clearly just plastic. As in other of Rabina's pieces, what appears to be touched with sublime beauty may, on second glance, be the product of (or cause for) violence. Another well-received work is a photograph of a clearly moneyed and meticulously clad male chest. The headless chest in a perfectly ironed white shirt sports a gold-plated pen at the shirt pocket. A tell-tale ink stain spreads from this pen; with its connotations of oil spills and undesired ejaculations, the stain spoils the perfect scene.
Untitled

Shown in the exhibition Passer By
Artists' Studios gallery space, Tel Aviv, May 2007
La Capella Gallery, Barcelona, September 2007

Rabina was one of two Israeli artists chosen for a Barcelona residency and exchange program. He stayed in Barcelona during July, 2006, shortly before fellow Israeli artist  HYPERLINK Koby Levy. 
The work he produced was shown in Passer By, co-curated with the JCVA by Barcelona curator Marti Peran,  in May 2007  in the Artists' Studios gallery space in Tel-Aviv.  The exhibition, which received a great deal of critical attention, included works by Levy as well as Barcelonian artists Domenec and Daniel Chust. It opens in Barcelona in the La Capella Gallery in September 2007.

Detail 1 documents a minor incident on the Barcelona beach.  A few of young tourists, blissed out in face of the horizon, are banished by police at dawn. The unmoving camera captures the delicate dismantlement of their temporary camp.  The night is over, and the group of youngsters is dispersed. Many "settlements" insist on continued existence, but communities based on emotion and driven by opportunities presented by the economy of desire submissively accept their own impermanence. Politics is translated into a miniature sexual choreography.

In Untitled (drunk), the slumped, sleepy body emits a sensuous still-life of colorful, juicy fruit. Here dreams produce no monsters; there is only a body in a liminal state, and an animate being depicted as part of a nature-morte. The scene evokes the identity of what we may have thought of as polar opposites: luscious-lively- tempting-juicy fruit (and boy) on the one hand, and the overflow of life that brings lassitude and even disgust on the other.