White Water

TITLE (artist name)

2026

The artistic process of Pinhas Ezra is inherently meditative. His painting emerges from a state of withdrawal, absolute concentration, and an internal listening to sensations, emotional echoes, and minute fluctuations of consciousness. His abstract works do not seek to express an identified idea or image, but rather to give presence to shifting states of being. The attraction to minimalism—to formal, material, and conceptual reduction—does not stem from a mere desire for aesthetic restraint, but from an insistence on touching the essence: that which precedes form, precedes language, and precedes the idea. From the tension existing in Ezra’s paintings between black and white, between appearance and disappearance, and between grasping material and letting go, an elusive intermediate space unfolds on the canvas: a primal, unconscious, pre-linguistic psychic zone.

The works in the exhibition "White Water" were created over the last five years—from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic to a lingering present of uncertainty. The quiet seclusion of that first pandemic spring, the body turning inward and contracting, left a deep imprint on Ezra’s paintings. Upon black canvases, bright, celestial circles began to emerge, floating in the darkness like air bubbles or halos of light. It seems that as the body contracted, the layers of paint on the canvas also diminished. The rounded forms were painted in white so diluted, almost watery, that they appear semi-transparent, weightless, and unmoored—as if existing in the delicate range between material presence and dissipation. In fact, he notes that the entire body of work presented in the exhibition was painted using only half a tube of paint—a gesture of extreme material reduction.

The starting point for his paintings is the black canvas; an emptied, infinite space that serves not as a background, but as an existential substrate. Ezra begins in darkness and creates halos of light within it. Yet, pictorially, the forms do not burst forth from the darkness in the depths of the painting, nor do they illuminate it. They are placed upon it, hovering on the surface, refusing to blend into one another; they articulate relationships of proximity and distance while maintaining clear boundaries and absolute formal separateness.

Indeed, at the heart of this painterly engagement lies the dynamic between holding on and letting go, between appearance and disappearance. The darkening, all-absorbing black may express a desire for disappearance, or a will to retreat into a continuous fetal state in search of an eternal womb. Even in Ezra’s early sculptures, human-sized cocoons appeared—hollowed plaster shells, ruptured bodily envelopes that revealed vulnerability. In those sculptures, he already expressed an engagement with a very primal state of life, which is naturally close to both birth and to fading and death. Similarly, the pale stains in Ezra’s new paintings articulate a kind of semi-vanishing act, exposed and fragile—bodies where all that separates them from the world is a thin membrane. It is no coincidence that the semi-transparent forms in his paintings evoke amniotic sacs; the circular brushstrokes converging toward the center create a sort of nipple, hinting at suckling, at a longing for maternal closeness and nourishment. In this context, "White Water" may also be interpreted as an allusion to breast milk—a primary source of life, a fluid of dependence, nourishment, and connection.

Another source of inspiration that ignites Ezra’s imagination comes from the depths of the sea. In a zone of absolute darkness on the ocean floor, deep-sea dwellers exist almost transparently, their bodies glowing from the dark with internal bioluminescence. These are the living creatures furthest from the Earth's surface and the sun's light, and Ezra—fascinated by them—imagines for them a different kind of consciousness. In his paintings, he seeks to touch a state of being that is not bound to the material reality around us, but rather an ancient or primordial existential state. The transparent entities floating in his paintings hover on the canvas as if seeking to part from matter, to soar, to transcend, and to deepen simultaneously. Ezra does not paint images; he paints the conditions of existence in liminal states. Between murky water and mother’s milk, between the womb and the depths of the sea, a primal space unfolds across the canvas—one where existence is not taken for granted and is created anew in every moment.