There was Fire
When I observe Shany Weiss's works, I feel as though I am standing before paintings of a scorched earth. The paintings appear to be composed of remnants or vestiges of an intense event that involved fire. Someone was here. Their movement is present.
This is a dry painting with a wet history, and the material emerges before the image, before any image; in fact, the material is the first image.
This is the way of the earth, alternating dryness and moisture, to invent life. The ochre and shellac ground in the painting originates from the planet and life upon it. The painting evokes a need to dig into it and see what is happening. It is like stumbling into an abandoned and sooty cave, a dark, painted cave of an undeciphered culture. A head whose body is a bucket, a basket full of birds, an eye becoming a boat, a tectonic table bearing fragments of landscape and body...
Weiss’s painting is dense, at times almost choked. The activity is abundant; some of its light sources are faint, and some are strong to the point of blinding, often emanating from the stones themselves. If there is a connecting thread between the things, that thread is stone. If one wishes, one can imagine that everything is made of stone and painted on stone. The stone is the spring, the water, and the light. The stone is also the pigment from which the color is derived. Caves, for the most part, are hewn in stone or dug into the earth, and the act of hewing is fundamental.
The images seem sculpted in paint; the feeling of the stones' and objects' weight is present. At times, it seems as if Weiss’s brush is hewing, digging, and chiseling, and at other times, molding with the material.
In the painting hanging in the entrance lobby, sheets of a blue tent are unfolded. I see it as a kind of air-filled lung amidst the soot and dust. The tent found its way into the painting through a game played during a journey between countries. Shany's daughter built a tent inside the house, and her mother built the tent inside the painting. The tent, in both cases, is a pure place of imagination. It is, itself, air and spirit.

Avi Sabah