The Earthy Sky

The works of Nadia Adina Rose aspire to covet for themselves choice pieces of space. The walls, the trees, the strips of land are snatched, bitten off from the sky, detached from their normal context and continue their lives in the artworks, a sort of lyrical aberration, as a memorial, a poetic assemblage.

The works cause the observer to ponder the riddle: in front of his eyes, a ritual deconstruction of reality into separate pieces is taking place, while simultaneously being gathered and assembled back together. Pondering the objects in the reliefs, which look as if they were cooked in a pan for many hours, brings to mind, against one's will, the word "magic." The impression created is that here, on the walls, presented is not only the result, but the entire process of creating these works is revealed in its nakedness and portrayed in all its aspects. It seems that it is possible to track the processes of stirring, pasting and cooking all of the ingredients.

Objects are made of paper machete and wood, some sculptures and others sketches, openly revealing not only their ingredients, but also the roughness of the surface. With the vague whisper of wood-paper bearing gray-brown colors, the works declare echoes of the impressions in Nadia Adina's consciousness, and stress that they are only imprints of her memory.

The objects, spread over the walls, are simultaneously abstract and concrete. They hide within themselves amorphism, characteristics of scenery, and also urban details. Superficially, the works are in constant flow between one condition and another; beginning with archetypal motifs, associated with the ground, with Mother Earth and the birth of the world, and ending with a concrete piece of land, the garden fence and items taken straight out of the domestic space.

Nadia Adina creates her objects in constant movement from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional. It seems that all of her works, perhaps because of their three-dimensionless and roughness, bear a sensual, perhaps even a sexual effect. The objects seem to embrace the observer with softness, to enchant, to wind, almost to stroke;  it is not clear if they are living creatures, parts of a body, or amazing subterranean creatures.

These reliefs seduce the observer with childish directness, with a lack of development and "finish," with form that is not completely defined. Perhaps for these reasons the objects sometimes seem amusing, funny, touching the heart, while remaining within their "sublime clumsiness": hills, branches, pits, pieces of carton or crumpled paper, as if they were forgotten in a sandbox near the house by an adult child who had gotten carried away by his play.

The heaven and the earth exchange places incessantly. The heaven becomes a heavy gray-brown relief. The earth - white, light and transparent. This continuous transformation game of the "earthy" and the "airy" creates a sense of fullness and cyclicity. The heaviness becomes light, the volumes - surfaces; the eternal cyclicity of yin and yang.

The characteristic cyclicity of Nadia Adina's work creates the effect of calming movement. The observer is invited to embark on a journey into childhood, to touch the sources, to return to the womb and to soar from there to reality. The observer's consciousness rocks as if in a cradle, between a line and a spot, between two-dimensional and three-dimensional, between stationariness and movement, between skyly earth and earthly sky.

With movement, with silence and with sound, while they are simultaneously both words and punctuation marks, these magical objects affect the surroundings and the observer and invite them into a dialogue that promises to be endless.

 

Lena Zaidel

Translation from Hebrew: Yehoshua Yair