The Slave Song | Amir Nave

Part One

Imagine you are a soap bubble that contains the entire human race.

- If you shut your eyes in front of the sun, you will see the color orange.

- Most people shut their eyes, that is why the world in the painting is orange.

What is interesting about a metronome is that if you run several metronomes simultaneously on the same surface, they will all synchronise within a moment. This is how the human race's aesthetic is also determined. It is not that one metronome infects the other by its ticking, but it is the surface that defines the common ticking. The individual submits to the law of the common pulse; it is contagious like plague.

Epidemics demonstrates that we are part of a greater power. One sick human organism. A huge flock of plastic birds move together in an exemplary order and without being able to resist the fact that everything is independent and moves by its own power.

In order to develop an individual ticking, one should not connect to any substrate or surface. Hegemony is the falsest of substrates, because it is not considered an ideology. The artistic approach determines the aesthetic. The world is divided into culture consumers and cultured people. Cultured people are considered savages in the eyes of culture consumers.

Part Two

- If you open your eyes in front of the sun, there is nothingness.

- Nothingness has everything but traces.

Cy Twombly would understand that.

Rothko couldn't go back to figurative painting referring to M. Gershuni's comments. The equation is not between death or one or another style of painting, but rather between death and the complete cessation of art.

Color patches breathe from the edges.

In the case of lines, one can observe a desire similar to that of treetops for height. And a line without a source will die as soon as the writing implement separates from the surface.

Clarification: Emotion in the case of drawing lines is an echo, not a source. A line begins to stretch from an origin, that is, from another dimension.

Some artists lie and start outside the canvas.

A person who destroys himself is not an interesting person.

Every person is a slide of the events, thoughts, desires and passions within him, and if you place all the slides of all the people on top of each other, the broadest common denominator will be self-destruction.

In that case ideology is the privilege of the weak, just like your blindness in the face of the apocalypse.

Question: What happens to a human organism when most of the particles that it comprised of are characterised by self-destruction?

Answer: A human organism that contains you and all human individuals within itself, understands that self-destruction is the most effective way of existence for it on Earth. And this is how it treats itself, hence us.

Alone against the whole world, like in every ending.

Coiled around your neck, hung from your shoulders, a snake's tongue whispers in your uterine shaped ear words unknown to you, about an upcoming apocalypse. Upon your imminent awakening, you will discover that the imaginary consolation offered to you by civilization no longer satisfies you.

Part Three

The truth starts from the middle and at the end there is nothingness / there is no death.

Middle

Through the ears / through the eyes / through the nose / through the legs / through the genitals / through the stomach / through the internal parts including the veins / arteries / blood / lungs / nails / the hair on the top of the foot / elbow / cheeks / the part connecting the throat to the tongue, let us call it the center of the pharynx.

From that point you can feel an urge to vomit which aims to discharge all future events which are written in the present almost clearly.

It is the metamorphosis of an individual slave within a slave organism in the midst of an apocalyptic era.

A stroke of a brush, a thin line in a pencil or a thought are a force that tests its legitimacy to exist. Like the power of the organism to destroy itself.

It can be beautiful to let something external (like desire) divert you from the path, until it becomes a pattern that repeats itself into a loop. Those who see this understand that the system always strips away the wonder. And only creation is absolute in choosing to give up the freedom to choose.

Those who committed suicide understood this and only those who are within the paradox understand how simple it is.

Joseph Beuys understood this; I prefer Andy Warhol because he was a prophet, and his prophecy comes from eternity. Duchamp's prophecy comes from his lifetime.

The concept of background in a painting is an aggressive thought. Aviva Uri understood this.

Up to a certain point it can be proven that the world is round, writing about art raises the possibility that it is flat.

You need another paradox to understand this.

An outsider's text in an exhibition is often the destruction of the artist's spirit.

An architecture of destruction has the most potential. You can learn how to destroy the "beautiful" provided you give up the technique, provided you give up everything. But then there is no language and there is an urge to die, and only art frees from this urge, and a life of creation is a constant relinquishment of the need to create.

Last Part

The Slave Song

Stop creating Stop wanting to create Stop being a person or a creative person Stop writing thoughts, not even in the sand. Creation is a violation of necessity, it is a constant contempt for every line, stain, every sound and thought. A person creates only from his most basic needs.

This is the slave song.

Only fragments can be understood from it and they raise two main questions:

Are we a slave organism on a substrate that is a sphere and the common denominator between us is self-destruction?

What is a slave measured in?

There is one answer to everything:

A slave organism assembled from self-destructive humans understands that this is the preferred situation, so it destroys itself. One way or another there is no force in the world that can stop an impulse of an organism that wants to destroy itself or a slave's urge to sing.

“The Slave Song” was exhibited at Chelouch contemporary art galley, Jaffa, on September 2022

The Last Breath Before Falling Asleep | Amir Nave

Just before dawn, you had to write these few lines. As though you were summoned by cries from the future to choose the road.

Coiled around your neck, hung from your shoulders, a snake's tongue whispers in your uterine shaped ear words unknown to you, about an upcoming apocalypse.

Until then, you led your life in perfect blindness, as though buried for all those years under the desert sand, beneath history.

Now, Upon your imminent awakening, you will discover that the imaginary consolation offered to you by civilization no longer satisfies you.

In the early morning hours, you will hear those distant cries, and you will attempt to memorize this last thought that came to your mind just before you fell asleep.

Then you realize that in the last breath before falling asleep, lies a memory with an occult power; one even capable of shattering the illusionary order of our world.

Finally, you will emerge from a long sleep. Perhaps you won’t exactly remember if you were a green caterpillar riding a horse, or maybe a colorful man had reflected in your face. Perhaps you will recall having heard the buzzing of a swarm of bees or seen lions and emergency exits – all calling out to you to open your eyes and awaken.

Your temples will probably be painful, and you will put your hands on your head – like those creatures who measure the world.

You will observe with breathless eyes, alone in front of it all. Reality in its fullest. And you don’t know anything about the aurora or that missing memory that lurked around you throughout the night, laughing and laughing.

* * *

What does yesterday’s kindness can offer one today, if not canceling all that has happened. Not out of disdain or hatred, or rejection nor love, etc., but because of yesterday’s debt to today: Remaining in itself and recognizing it's irrelevance for tomorrow. This sublime enormous gap, which passes through like a wing-clap, bound by time. Maybe several hours, maybe a few minutes. That space that separates yesterday’s life from today’s life is an eternity that can only be defeated by disregarding it. Like death, falling asleep only takes an instant. It is an illusive time unit which leaves us no genuine memory of itself. We can’t distinguish it from the series of phenomena that preceded it. The moment that follows this breath after which we fall asleep never coincides with the one that preceded it. Between the two of them, fragile webs are being woven, a visit to other worlds, both celestial and telluric, torn by the first breath with dawn.

And if we awaken?… Really awaken? And if we awakened, would we still be the same person? Would we awaken facing the same world?

“Le dernier soupir avant de s'endormir” was exhibited at galley In Situ-Fabienne Leclerc, Paris, on May-June 2022

The Slave Age | Amir Nave

Following a global apocalypse, individuals from around the country gathered en masse for what appears to be an endless caravan. They are marching without a clear purpose nor destination - perhaps the sole reason for action in a hollow space that rejects any interpretation. Those who gathered are in constant doubt, defying any social class or political identity in the modern world.

In literature, we are familiar with the genre of travel novels, in which a protagonist, usually an outstanding individual, leaves on an adventure due to a crisis, attracts followers and achieves an accolade, examples being Buddha, Moses, Jesus and Odysseus etc. However, unlike those heroic male figures, In the world created in this project there are no leaders, no gospel. It is a caravan of slaves, their origin is unknown, with no masters and no passion for power. but they are fully aware - Servitude is in their nature, they accept the human submissive burden without question, without despair. The latter exists only through our gaze, that lacks the understanding of this primal evolutionary state which we are a part of. Our bodies are getting older, twisted, crumbling into our original existence as Microorganisms.

I was fascinated with the thought of a slave without a master, of the attempt to set apart those two fundamental states within every human culture. What happens to a slave when he is no longer enslaved? The slave in its raw existence acknowledges the ruins of the past, present and future and expects nothing. He moves forward at a set pace of 60 seconds per minute, accepting his calling while carrying the temporary earthly body that was assigned to him. He is the final evolutionary metamorphosis, yet just another vehicle of time.

“The Slave Age” is an installation assembled from large oil paintings, wood & plaster sculptures. It was exhibited in Ein-Harod Museum of art, Israel, on January-May 2022