Greddy Assa puts out an exhibition of forty-nine large format canvases created between 2010 and 2014. Sixtieth anniversary, yet only a retrospective of feelings. The selection of paintings includes portraits whose elusive protagonists defy analysis, leaving a scent and the sound of a tune instead; there are also drawings where the artist juggles with anatomical reference points, yet most of the paintings have sprung out of mirages, memories of momentary experiences, associations brought by places or events. They legitimize the fleeting, the ever elusive, which happens in dreams during half-sleep; maybe the longing for this ever elusive thing, the feeling, … flavored with irony, mixed up with childish faith in the miracle that is this close to happening. That is why the desert, which harbors the prospect of any mirage, which is a constantly changing scene of the imaginary, charged with the potential for transformation, was chosen as a muse and a tool.

“The desert — a hidden breath, a place of countless dangers, yet also of endless aestheticism, inspiring me as an artist, a discoverer of unexpected beauty… It starts from sand banks, pushes away every last one of the already sparse bare rocks, reminds of the Moon’s surface, standing so close with its many faces. Her stripes, like the convulsions of the soul, harbor a sense of weightlessness. Having attracted the company of countless sand dunes, looking like reclining nymphs — I am asking myself whether I do exist? I feel otherworldly silence among the heaps of sand, triggering in me the feeling of the unknown and irreversible. Loneliness and dehydration of imagination.

… It makes me feel like a grain of sand, one of many, yet a grain with a world of its own, a world full of freedom, hope, inspiration… And regardless of the occasional feeling that I do not exist outside the desert, I can see hope in the fact that I have been able to make this journey through the desert in my thoughts, that my momentary melancholy is entirely gone, that maybe temperature inversion has made me hope that what I get to see tomorrow will take me by surprise yet again…

All that is left for me to do is keep walking…”

Greddy Assa