It is perhaps in the deafening silence of the ruins that the rustling of time is best understood, to the point that the architecture of abandonment invades the work of Michel Kirch until the commonplace is transformed into familiar place.

The blue color of the sky and the theme of the breach are the only metaphorical barometers capable of offering the exact measure of a space whose motionless rhythm tells, paradoxically the energy, says the artist, of "another life afterwards. life". In "Old Jaffa's Dream", Michel Kirch questions the ghost of what was once Jaffa, an Arab city on the edge of the new Jewish city of Tel Aviv, largely deserted following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

The photograph retains the image of a dilapidation having acquired the value of landscape, at the extreme limit of an existence returned to its primary, chromatic and formal elements.

Abandoned by its characters, the Jaffa stage becomes its own theater, like a setting suddenly drawn into the heat of the action. Houses creak and tear, dragged into the midst of capsizing or, more and more, breakthroughs confuse the exterior space and the interior of buildings.

In a consistent chromatic dialectic, the light of day and the blue of the sky thus visit these spoils of time, poetic ornaments where asking questions about the beginning and the end is no longer conclusive.

 

Radu Vasile

Art critic