Books in pictures - Mony Almalech

Review

 by Prof. Dr. Habil. Miroslav Dachev for the 

exhibition “Books in Paintings” of Prof. Habil. Mony Almalech

It is easier for the reader to believe that Mony Almalech’s book “The Color in the Pentateuch” (2006) begins with the words “Biblical Hermeneutics” than with “Oil pastel and drypoint”. Yet even before opening the book, when we hold it in our hands, the gaze slips from the title and fixes itself on the image beneath it, dense with associations. Upon leafing through, we discover that the book bears a subtitle – “A Linguistic Picture of the World” (Worldview). Inevitably, we begin to think of the image as a picture of the world as well. Turning the page again, we learn that this is a painting by the author himself, created much earlier (1993), entitled “Sensation of Jerusalem”. Jerusalem as the world: must we traverse the ideas that, across centuries, have permeated three religions, shake off the blood of the Crusades, and arrive at the painful present, which, together with its grandeur, always portends many uncertainties? In a certain sense, Jerusalem “is” the world. From this point onward, whatever interpretive framework we adopt, we encounter a hidden, intimate dialogue between the scholar – who skillfully reveals the worldview (linguistic picture of the world) through the colors of the Pentateuch – and the artist, who has envisioned a picture of the world through his own laying down of colors.

Yes, “The Color in the Pentateuch” begins with oil pastel and drypoint, not with biblical hermeneutics. This is disconcerting, not because it is incomprehensible, but because it risks remaining unnoticed. I am certain that some of Almalech’s readers were surprised by the announcement of this exhibition, for they had not paid sufficient attention to the fact that, in writing his books, he not only bequeaths to us part of his creative explorations in the realm of the image (where another presence and understanding of color – beyond language – awaits us), but also presents to the reader a silent dialogue between image and word, a dialogue whose voice would one day inevitably seek amplification. Today is the day of that amplification.

“Books in Paintings”: what, in fact, does the author invite us to through the title of his exhibition? The most obvious answer – to see “the paintings in the books” – is long behind us, for that would mean stopping at their merely illustrative function. Also behind us is another perception: that the paintings live in the books in two ways – either fully presented, in natural colors, or through their details, most often digitally processed in black and white (perhaps to make their structure more visible), which cut across specific spaces of the books. Typical examples are the images in “The Light in the Old Testament”, “The Darkness in the Old Testament”, and “The Red Codes in the Old Testament”.

With its radical reversal of direction, “Books in Paintings” is an invitation beyond the illustrative. In the context of the exhibition, it leads to several possible consequences. One of them requires over-interpretation: the transformation of books into paintings. This unexpected metamorphosis is achievable in several ways.

First, I will employ the figure of the wide-angle lens, in order to gain the broadest possible vision of the text. In the painting we might discover perspectives drawn from the text, an additional key to understanding the word, which can then be extended across the entire text. The books – as approximation and interpretation – are encoded not only in their own linguistic world, but also in the paintings. The biblical world is accessible through the word, but also through the image. The language “about” color enters into dialogue with the language “of” color. Jerusalem serving as a shared interpretant for both. Understanding the painting provides a new, supplementary understanding of the book – a dialogue eternal, painfully familiar. I look at the painting “in order to understand the book”. But the reverse is also possible: to use the text as a perspective on the painting.

The painting is an epigraph: endowed with immense semiotic potential, yet at risk of being overlooked. The publishing house “Kibea” offers an elegant solution to this problem: whereas in Almalech’s earlier books, published elsewhere, the painting lived alone within the space of the book, now it has a second life: first, the painting itself comes alive – not only on the cover but also in numerous new black-and-white details within the text; second, these details are joined by fragments from other paintings. The painting-epigraph projects forward into the text, while the text, in turn, may retroactively illuminate it.

The event that gathers us here presupposes yet another way of understanding how books may be seen as paintings, and suggests the use of a different lens: first, the covers must be allowed to grow into objects of independent observation; then, the cover must be painfully cropped to the frame of the image. In this figure of photographic enlargement, the metamorphosis occurs once again: the books are diminished as word, in order to be magnified as image – a justified sacrifice in the name of the event. I gaze into the painting “in order to understand the painting itself”; I rediscover it. The painting is a title. Its semiotic potential is beyond doubt. In this case, unlike the epigraph, the painting cannot be overlooked. Yes, in “Kibea” editions some scattered title-paintings within the text must be reassembled, and a reconstruction of color undertaken, but the painting is here, and it speaks. The painting-as-title suggests that the text will return to it.

Mony Almalech clearly insists that the paintings not be ignored, though the paths of metamorphosis remain with the viewer/reader. Yet he would hardly be satisfied if the reader, armed with photographic enlargement, were to stop at the significance of the image without allowing the painting and the text to interpenetrate. The exercise of looking now takes the reverse direction – not in the painting (I see) the book, but in the book (I see) the painting – yet both are directions of a dialogue that awaits being heard.

Thus: to see the books-as-paintings, to see through the paintings, is a deceptive privileging of paintings over books. If this exhibition has an object, it is not the paintings, but the dialogue that unfolds between paintings and books, with reversible directions of correspondence. Until now, it seems, we have been interested in Mony Almalech the writer. Now, at the moment when attention is expectedly redirected toward Mony Almalech the painter, I discover – together with the expanded world of the paintings – a new, even stronger invitation to look into the writing, into its new function: to narrate the paintings. An invitation to see that in the worlds he constructs, and for which the book exists, there is also a memory of the painting, a silent conversation with it. It is logical that (until now) the paintings have helped me to see the text in yet another way. It is equally logical to realize (today) that I may look into the paintings for their own sake, without necessarily subordinating them to the text. Most logical of all, however, seems to be to see how, in this mixture, the hologram of the author pulses; how the texts, too, can help me to see the paintings – they are the other side of the explorations of the biblical world. That for which – at a certain stage of its life – the paintings entered the texts. Mony Almalech offers a language  “about” color and a language  “of” color – not as two separate languages, but through their pairing. And if, from one perspective, it is true that the paintings enter the texts, it is no less true that the texts enter the paintings; they choose them.

As readers/viewers, we inhabit a far richer world of suggestions than word or image alone could achieve. Universals of human experience, cultural units, codes, sensations – in their untranslatability – are imperceptibly embedded together in the books, and perceptibly together in the exhibition. The visitor to the exhibition is openly required also to be a reader of Mony Almalech’s books, in order to grasp the fullness of the conversation. Otherwise, he will simply endow the paintings with an isolated life, from which their author long ago deprived them, in the name of dialogical word.

Paintings and Books: Interwoven Territories

The paintings, as appearances, precede the books by quite some time (the exception being “Biblical Fires” from 2014, which adheres to the cover of “The Red Codes in the Old Testament” from the same year). This creates the impression of an early reaching toward the “language of color” (the paintings) and a later reaching toward the “language about color” (the books) – an impression that seems to trace a line of correspondence and yet… may mislead. For in the author’s thought, painting and book, may have been born and lived together, or they may alternate; they may complement and interpret one another, or else compete, struggling for dominance in the field of meaning. But they are hardly indifferent to one another. I can almost imagine how, before the writing of “The Color in the Pentateuch”, Mony Almalech had for many years “Sensation of Jerusalem” before him – questioning, reminding, inspiring, breaking out of its frame, forgetting that it is “merely” a painting. And how, at last, after many sleepless nights and days, the painting awaited the book’s appearance, how the two were no longer separate, but together. Just as they had long coexisted in the author’s consciousness, so now they are finally united in the text, before the reader: an intimate sharing. 

Paintings and texts are maps of the same territory, the territory in which Almalech’s thought circulates: The Old Testament, color (chromaticity), language (expression). And the reader/viewer must read them precisely as maps – at once distinct and yet together. Only in their layering do they present the fullness of the territory. 

Cut-off roots, severed by the frame, slipping from view, dart across the canvas as directions – not so much of imagined new figures of the image as of figures of meaning. This is the triptych “Roots” (1993). With its rhizomatic momentum, it presents a model for thinking the world. “Roots I” is Porphyry’s tree yearning toward the rhizome, cut alive, without beginning or end. But it is also the sensation of the language of colors, summoned to illustrate: a scholarly effort which, despite its methodological order, believes in the infinity of interpretation. It is no accident that “Roots” is akin to “Science (Knowledge)” from 1982, in which Porphyry’s tree becomes a true Labyrinth – a semiotic universe, a network of interpretants, virtually infinite. Here, invisible to the eye, the color codes of the Old Testament flow outward, sketching future directions for books not yet written. Without being on the cover of a book, “Science (Knowledge)” lives inscribed within “Roots I”, for it is part of its essence, but also within “Roots II”, in whose bright disc one seems to glimpse the realization of its future project. 

“Sensation of Jerusalem” is a palimpsest. Green flashes across yellow (gold); beneath it, and at times beneath the green, we glimpse red; the horizontal-diagonal striations across the yellow (gold) are at once tolerance (allowing other colors to be seen), but also sickness, decay (a non-homogeneous structure, corroded by other colors), and at the same time dream (a sfumato vision, a faintly outlined desire), which knows no stasis. One cannot read any single color without simultaneously reading it with the others. Like the fate of Jerusalem: layers of history (I cannot help but recall the allegorical, yet also literal, removal of layers of refuse and earth to uncover the precise location of Solomon’s Temple). The painting evokes memories of nebula, of creation – that is to say, of Beginning, somewhere there, in infinity, invisible to us, yet visible to the eye (now we all see the sun as an all-seeing eye), His presence, which demands that the Pentateuch be woven in words and clothed in colors and meanings. The book that follows this painting attempts to arrange the world with elegance, to taxonomize it, to make us think of it in categories. But the painting discourages: is this orderliness only temporarily possible? Can the human mind truly encompass the world in this way and see it as a flawless paradigm, even if only with respect to colors? Is this not God’s territory, upon which man is permitted only temporarily to map? “Sensation of Jerusalem” is also concealed within the sweep of another painting, “The Second Coming” (1992), which likewise appears to have remained without a book. Having subdued the brightness of its colors, it is like a detail from its overall compositional message – calmed, yet knowing that the connection of the awaited event with Jerusalem is more alive than ever. 

Thus, I can think of each of the paintings – stripping it of its own meanings, binding it to the meanings of the books. And not only the books of Mony Almalech, but of others as well, in which the Bible itself becomes part of the vortex. To restrain this unexpected momentum, however, I will remain only with what the author himself has created. No longer do his paintings grow merely as added value to his books, but the reverse as well. Paintings and books have intertwined, like roots, the logical-linguistic order of color with the natural unrest of chromaticity; biblical verbal explorations with chromatic sensations of the biblical. In the accompanying synesthesia (here I also hear the voice of music), the reader/viewer is ever less alone in Almalech’s biblical worlds. And ever less persuaded that today he is invited to view only paintings.