PATRON is proud to present our second solo exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Liat Yossifor. The exhibition titled, Letters Apart, will open to the public on Saturday, January 30 and will continue through March 20, 2021.
A canyon pulled apart by an etching river,
Boring and taking on the rocks and rushing
Them away, mineral by mineral, to the sea,
One with the sky, a hawk, soaring through,
Of the same ancient entropic matter,
Eyes and hook, claw and feather, down,
Red and sharp, carving an echo in the sky.
-Ed Schad, Carve, A reflection on Liat Yossifor, Bird-Like, 2020
In the late 80s, following her immigration to the United States, Liat Yossifor corresponded with a childhood friend in Israel through hand-written letters. The exchange became a form of storytelling and a way for her to remain connected to home. This exhibition draws upon a similarly intimate exchange of ideas between Yossifor and Los Angeles-based writer Ed Schad. Throughout their dialogue, he has written poems in response to Yossifor’s paintings on paper, generating quiet, impactful prose that pulls at the undercurrents of history, emotion, chance, and bodily presence that exists in the work. Composed of new oil paintings on paper and a monumental oil on linen, the exhibition amplifies the quiet closeness of the works produced in the last year. Created daily, the paintings on paper are small in scale and act as invitations, asking the viewer to come in, come close, and join the moment. Like the exchange of memories, prose, or letters, these works speak to the weight and importance of small intimacies. They hold us together, despite the necessity of being apart at this particular moment.
At large, Liat Yossifor’s practice is a manifestation of the physical body through mark-making and a meditation on emotion. Often executed in trance-like meditative states, each painting is created through layered workings and re-workings of thick, impastoed oil paint. Through this process, Yossifor creates a record of movement, of mind, and of body, and, as a result, her paintings emanate a frenetic, vibrational frequency that flows from the surface like an echo.
Throughout the last year, Yossifor has explored the work of Jean Fautrier and the Art Informel movement and similarly uses the impasto technique to complicate the pictorial plane. In previous works, her thick surfaces would generally erase or obscure the imbedded image, but the works in this exhibition mark a new direction, in which the image and material work together to form an environment. They act almost as sculptural reliefs, telling a story through what is both present and absent.
