All quotes in this text are from Hagay Luria.

In an interview I saw (or dreamt), the interviewer asks Clement Greenberg if he believes that artists will always be concerned with medium-specific questions. Greenberg replies: Yes (!).

Encountering Hagay Luria's paintings, I felt the timelessness of the medium as a subject, and the understanding that the engagement with the conditions of creation will never wear out, standing at the very foundation of the creative act.

"One of the essential differences between sculpture and painting is the contour line. In sculpture (and for that matter, in any object), the contour line is the object itself. It not only marks its distinctiveness within reality, which is the essence of an object, but also participates in describing the character and content of the object. In a painting, the boundaries of the object are a marker of a physical territory where an event takes place, and they have nothing to do with its essence or content besides its physical dimensions."

One can truly feel how the paintings in the exhibition are a result and a reinterpretation of this distinction. The paintings have two prominent boundaries: the boundaries of the object depicted in the painting, and the boundaries of the painting/format itself. A prominent part of the body of work includes paintings at the center of which are a kind of "sculptures" - geometric bodies that move along an axis between an architectural and an organic presence. The engagement with three-dimensionality is one of the expressions in Luria's work of his intensive exploration of the relationship between the mental and the physical. In painting, and consequently in the viewing experience, a fusion of these two aspects of existence is created. The logic of viewing sculpture is transferred to the painting.

When we view a three-dimensional object, we move to gather the different information received from each viewpoint. In a painting, the viewpoint is given to us, fixed and indifferent to our movement. Standing before Luria's paintings, we understand that moving will not grant us an additional angle of the mysterious object. But, perhaps due to the feeling that the painting contains additional angles to which we have no access, the soul, as if by reflex, which expresses the connection between sight and body movement, moves within us to the painting as if it were a body itself, rising up, moving sideways, becoming active. This is done to adopt the painting's viewpoint and to gain additional angles inspired by it. This internal movement serves as a reminder of the connection ingrained within us, which we understand and feel intuitively, between sight and body—a viewpoint is not a product of an exclusive relationship between the eye and an object, but rather the eye is part of a body, and the viewpoint depends on the body's changing relationship to the object.

"It was the moment I stood before the famous blank canvas and realized that imagination and spirit don't need painting. And immediately my body entered a state of active tension, like a state of alertness. It was as if my body was experiencing abandonment and rage. Then I imagined the body mocking the soul for its arrogance in thinking it could contemplate spiritual development, but abandoning the body. The act of painting became the place where the body carves out its place and marks a space and form where they are intimately and almost inevitably intertwined due to the limitation and 'uniqueness' of the pictorial dimension, which only the body can produce as a physical dimension, and the spirit can inhabit as reality. Therefore, painting is a place of truth that comes from a very deep intimacy of the human condition of matter and dimension/spirit (dimension in the sense of abstract, a general state)."

Despite the construction of three-dimensional bodies, the paintings retain a quality of flatness. I tried to decipher why a feeling of layering emerges from the paintings, even in those that appear to have been painted in a single layer over the background color. The layering of the paintings is not in the traditional underpainting for creating depth, nor does it come from a sense of being made with a repetitive logic of layers for erasing and concealing. This feeling, in my opinion, is an expression of how these objects, these shapes, this language were formulated and refined. The layers are not just the layers on the canvas, but layers of the conceptual history that created the formal development before us. And as Luria's description of his working method reveals, the painting constitutes a continuous record of a dialogue between what he places before him and what emerges before him from within.

"Instead of 'subject matter,' I think of a pictorial/stylistic range, like a horizon. I mean conceptually. I have general clues as to where it begins and ends, but the boundaries of the range (you could call it a field of action) are revealed during the work. When I say 'stylistic,' I mean a language. It's as if I'm standing in front of a wall that is the entire pictorial language. I choose a strip on the general horizon that I want to hit with the ball, and that is the domain of the language in which I operate. Each work is a repeated hit to that same point and back to me. The act of marking the range on the wall comes from a crack I identify in the wall that feels intimate enough or intriguing enough for me to push myself into, in a way that I can both inhabit it and say something about the wall. One could say that in every work I do, at the end of it I need to recognize myself or expand my identity/my language."

Every painting in the exhibition begins with a fixed format: a square canvas, in a limited number of recurring sizes, at the center of which a shape is formulated against a background—like a single sentence with a clear grammatical structure. Within this given framework, the differences between paintings exist. Like words in a language, where the difference between one word and another and the spaces between them create meaning, here too the paintings operate on each other with a syntactic logic. The eye moves between the paintings and learns to identify internal rules, exceptions, and echoes. Between one square and another, a network is woven that heralds the essence of the language.

The paintings invite us to decipher them with the tools we have by being human beings. We make an effort against them as if against a new language. But the "deciphering" comes precisely during a pause, when for a moment we are not sustaining the effort of reading. Directly and without need for explanation, the painting reveals to us an internal thing that was already present within us. In its appearance, it is familiar to us, specific, and concrete despite being abstract. This same thing that we identify exists in the painting and exists within us, together and separately, a unique experience that raises a question about the overlap in our internal, spiritual, and sensory worlds. Can that same point where the painting becomes clear to us be the same for different people?

Tamar Sharara 2025