Shlomo Harush. Segments by email. June 30th, 2020 - September, 2020

BUILDING is always looking for new approaches that throw the focus on art, experimentation and communication, working on projects that aim to reach out to the public and fulfill the needs of the artists. During lockdown, it became clear that BUILDING needed to explore new methodologies and languages for communicating art, and we intuited the importance of a new, completely #online project that would free art from any structural, temporal or spatial limits. This led to the idea of creating a virtual project that would engage with new ways of exhibiting and storytelling, accessible through the website and other #web platforms. The idea was to foster new forms of artistic and curatorial experimentation, gravitating around the relationship with the physical space of BUILDING, and also a more surreal dimension.

During lockdown the artist Shlomo Harush, who has collaborated with BUILDING in the past, continued working on a new piece in his studio in New York. It was in a medium he had never used before - video - and the end result is a striking new set of video animations. This combination of situations, albeit geographically distanced, offered an opportunity for connection, linking the artist's new path and that of BUILDING. In his short animations, which center on repetitions of simple, sometimes abstract actions, #shlomoharush reflects on the narrative potential of the #digital sphere as a way of immediately sharing an idea, feeling or moment of lived experience. Virtual space thus offers an ideal platform for testing out new ways of exhibiting and delving into the questions facing art at this difficult time.

The special project Segments by email is both physical and virtual: it can be visited in the gallery and accessed online. In the videos, human figures and dancing objects come together against a jumble of geometric, variable, abstract lines, as if something were happening on the #web and getting lost due to an algorithm that autonomously generates new shapes and colors.

This is how the artist explains his work: "I created this new series of works during lockdown in New York city, at a time of deep silence for everybody. I thought and felt that the right thing to do was to work with this collective silence. My work therefore developed through the idea and sense of three-dimensionality. The videos are the result of a different way of conceiving my traditional sculptures, a way that was suggested by the silence I was talking about. These short animations are therefore a combination of my sculptures and drawings, and adapt to both the real exhibition space and its virtual counterpart. They are moving images that can become sculptures, go back to being a drawing or a painting and also split into frames and segments of the composition. As the artist concludes, it is "An exhibition that can be sent by e-mail".

Biographical notes
 
Shlomo Harush (Jerusalem, 1961) studied Middle Eastern history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and photography at Hadassa Community College. After living and working in Milan from 1990 to 1997, he moved to New York City in 1998, and since then he has worked in a studio in Brooklyn. For #shlomoharush art is a manifestation of freedom: not only is it a vehicle for communicating his vision of the world, but the great physical power that goes into creating his pieces is an immediate release of the energy that shapes each work.
Letting himself be guided by the material, rather than dominating it, Shlomo coaxes it to relate to the world of ideas, transferring drawings into a three-dimensional environment.
The moment of transformation when the drawing becomes a sculpture and the sculpture becomes a new drawing, switching from one dimension to another, is made possible by light and shade, which, when they merge with the works, create another dimension which is not material but nonetheless perceptible.