OIL ON FABRIC
Solo Exhibition, The Heder Gallery, Tel Aviv, 2008
Curator: Iris Mendel
Hadas Hassid's solo exhibition "Oil on Fabric" is composed of a series of works of oxidized papers alongside drawings executed in different techniques, a digital image and a sculptural object. The works conduct an internal dialogue fashioned along several axes. They seek to link together processes of absorption and processes of desiccation and weathering, and offer a possibility for an action which concerns passivity. The actions shaping the works restrict themselves to a limited space. These actions are introverted, small - almost anti actions.
In the series of oxidized papers Hassid relinquished the use of paint, exposing the paper to sunlight while changing the areas and duration of exposure. In this series Hassid inverts the mode of operation underlying her previous series, in which the painting was created by immersing the surface in liquid paint that enveloped it with layers of material. Here Hassid chose to annul material and keep only the surface, while turning the gaze to its frailty. The paper's wear and tear attribute is the one which generates the painted manifestation floating and emerging from within it. This series is reminiscent of tactics employed in Israeli and international conceptual and minimalist art, except Hassid attempts to detach the formal reduction from a decisive or determined tone and reattach it to the sadness of the mundane–the banal wear of the paper.
In the work "Oil on Fabric" a bottle of cooking oil is mounted on a wall, aimlessly dripping little by little onto a cloth folded into a disciplined square, forced to keep absorbing and absorbing. The examination of the absorption capacity limit of the material is mirrored in reverse in a large scale drawing of a meandering line, drawn with a felt tip pen that was gradually drying up, consequently dictating the duration and conclusion of the drawing.
The work "Evaporation" addresses a process of disappearance. On Wikipedia the value "evaporation" is defined through its dissimilarity to the process of boiling. In both processes there is a transition from a state of liquid to gas, except whereas boiling takes place only when a given material has reached a certain temperature defined as the boiling point, evaporation takes place at a certain pace, sometimes a very slow one, and in any temperature. One could say that the molecules of the surface are at a perpetual state of slow and quiet evaporation.