Bird Stone 3, 2026

https://oreneliav.com/#/exhibition/bird-stone-2026

It is not a bird made of stone (a stone bird), but a bird stone, a stone with "birdness", a stone with something of a bird in it. Sometimes it's visible and sometimes it is hidden, nesting.

The paintings in the exhibition move as a sequence between stone and bird and back, like selected frames from a movie about an evolution of a form.

The movement is cyclical. Changes are registered on a 3D lattice. In painting, this means placing dots and connecting them with lines. Beneath the paintings, like a wave, a repeating pattern is continuously generating the movement, appearing then reappearing as something else.

My last exhibition at Gordon Gallery, "The Island Was a World," introduced a series of paintings titled "Law." These are stone or wood slabs bearing reliefs, found scattered on the island. They feature different arrangements of carved birds, contained within a box or frame and hung on a wall. Each such relief carries spatial information, like a QR code or DNA, that can come to life by interpretation, just by looking at it. It is unclear if they are 2D or 3D, like holograms.

Among the infinite stages between a stone and a bird, the painting on the wall is the one realised and present in the world. A rockslide, a flock of birds, or a constellation, the question is how they fell into one arrangement or another.

Unlike most of my works, which start with an image, in the geometric paintings, like "Constellation," the image is generated by simply dividing the canvas, with an X from corner to corner. In these paintings, the image never disappears. I can erase it and immediately find it. Here, the image is a geometric law, existing before the painting was even born.

The canvas can be divided and filled with all manner of lines and patches, giving rise to shapes and sub-shapes. When these shapes are seen, some are recognized. This happens when you can point and say: "here is a bird" or "here is a stone." Looking is naturally looking for a name, but between one name and another, there lies a vast, silent field of nameless shapes, the field of painting.

www.oreneliav.com