It is always a pleasant event to see a great art as it evolves and manifests itself and even more pleasant , when it’s happening with a good friend and colleague.
Rona Shahar’s unveiling of “Panthera Tigris Nisnas“, an installation- exhibition is definitely such an event. The exhibition includes two large oil paintings and numerous studies, drawings, water color on paper and photographs, all related to the subject of wild tigers roaming the streets of Wadi Nisnas in Haifa, as if reclaiming their natural habitat.
Tiger on Wire
Like much of great art, the evolution of the works came through a series of hunches much visual thinking and many happy coincidences ,combined with a disciplined perseverance, meticulous observance of details and of course the one ingredient without which this never could have happened ; great talent.
It took Rona a year and a half to slowly precipitate the exhibition from the initial first impressions, trough sketches, studies, brooding on the concept, adjusting it slowly to the ever shifting vision until the general direction was closed but not sealed.
The birth of good art begins only after the completion with its release to the world at large and the beginning of a fruitful dialog with the audience .As a member of Rona’s faithful audience, I had the good fortune to be present in the opening of the exhibition in her studio in Haifa and was awestruck by the precision and the masterful combination of all four ingredients that need to coexist in order to make the magic of great art happen.
These four ingredients are; right time, right place, done in a right way by a right person.
As you can see from the little example of the attached painting, the right way, shows clearly in the obvious talent and the expert execution with masterful attending to details without losing touch of the overall design and composition. This in itself is a great achievement in my opinion as is a big stumbling block in much of the realistic painting where the attention to details can be too overpowering, stealing attention from the theme. Here, the tiger rests on the electric wire post, exhibiting both curiosity about the audience, staring at us, the viewers from below and the same time total indifference, creating a potent message that is playful, comic, serious and even shocking at the same time.
The shock value comes from the surreal aspect of placing a wild animal on the verge of extinction in unexpected, specifically urban setting, disregarding the utilities of the human’s environment as if an act of revenge for all the distraction of the tiger’s natural habitats in the wild brought about by the humans inconsiderate brutality.
This powerful and regal animal that once ruled the wild and captured the imagination of humanity with its agile beauty, strength and fierceness, now reduced mostly to a life in prison of a zoo pointed at by the humans who have lost all sense of the Wild and the Untamed.
Rona releases the tigers into this unique and special neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas, an act of mercy with many symbolic layers, reminding us that the wild can always reclaim its habitat and one day, it may well materialize.
But there is also another very significant symbolic layer in the choice of the neighborhood which is now a model of a fruitful, peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews but it was not always like that and the past of this neighborhood holds many painful memories of war and loss of homes by the original Palestinian inhabitants. Could it be that Rona senses the underground tension that still exists in this place, a tension that could turn into a wild, untamed rage of which the tiger is capable?
The meaning of the name Nisnas in Arabic is the mammal; Mongoose, which is a friendly and benign animal that poses no threat or danger, so let’s hope that the addition of the Nisnas to Panthera Tigris will result in cooperation and the making of good Art instead of release of untamed rage.
Rona explaining
