Night Shift 2019

Kabri Gallery, Kabri
Curator: Ron Kuner

The three series of paintings comprising in Night Shift – two of them figurative and the third abstract – were executed in parallel, connected through the shared temporality of the night shift in which they exist. As in Rembrandt’s Night Watch, in Platek’s work, too, the images emerge out of darkness – and from the dark times in which they were made, days of war.

The depictions in the show originate from a number of photographic sources: Platek’s own archive, scientific captures of animal species and screen shots from videos footage of the recent war in Gaza. In contrast to the arrested immediacy of digital imagery, painting involves the extended duration of time waited out between layers left to dry, the traces of former attempts, erasures and corrections painted over. Platek asks us to look at photography through the eyes of a painter.

The first series in the show includes paintings in varying formats, some with extreme lighting (a palm in nocturnal light, sea daffodils overexposed from a camera flash) and others with the blurry, pixilated images of an armed conflict (the mushroom cloud of a bombing, two vaguely seen militants emerging from the sea at dusk), eliciting both attraction and unease.

The second series, painted after images taken in nature with camera traps, focuses on snapshots of animals trailing near the camera, as the ambient darkness provides only little information on their surroundings. The brisk, decisive brushstrokes convey a sense of urgency and transience, of the animal mentality of wildlife species and the constant need to stay in motion so as not to fall prey (the series was also exhibited separately, see Sha’ar Hagai).

The abstract paintings in the show’s third series, in large formats of uniform size, were made using techniques involving spray paint, ready-mades, drawing and more. Looking at the paintings we perceive forms that seem familiar, the hint of an image not explicitly laid out in the paintings. Viewers, then, are invited to conduct themselves as hunters, to track down an image tangled in an abstract formation, to capture ties and patterns of their own.