Parterre Projects Space is pleased to open its fourth cycle of activity with a solo exhibition by Matti Harel, featuring paintings and drawings from recent years. Harel's painted world is a world without law but with a mythopoetic power or logic. Some of the works are accompanied by poems written for them by German artist Daniel Richter. The name "Opening" refers to the opening of a horizon present in almost all the paintings, to the opening of cards, or to the revelation of fate.

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The exhibition booklet presents the images alongside quick, sharp, concrete and fluid poems by Daniel Richter. The paintings indeed call for a poetic gaze; the eye contemplates them while wandering into realms of dreams, places where things merge, lose or take shape as in a children's game or theatrical improvisations. The figures are broken or distorted, and their outlines dissolve. Something is poured or diluted, seeking a place against a horizon that opens like a riddle. The overall feeling is of painting and a painterly act that has organic inner life.

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Harel draws heavily from the history of painting, and his series of paintings and drawings contains references to techniques and subjects mainly from the Baroque and Renaissance periods. However, the ordering and unifying force of the great masters is missing here. If in classical painting every gesture is exquisitely painted and every part is placed next to another to create a complete picture, in Harel's work the painting maintains immediacy and randomness within an abandoned world, and the figures in it appear simultaneously free and lost.

Roy Brand