Shay Frisch’s exhibition in Palermo

From October 6 to November 19, 2017, at the Polo Culturale dei Cantieri della Zisa, in the prestigious exhibition venue ZAC_ Zisa Arti Contemporanee, the Councillorship for Cultural Affairs of the City of Palermo will present to the public the Israeli artist Shay Frisch’s monumental light installations.

o following his latest important international exhibitions at the MAC in Lima, the MAC in Santiago de Chile, and the San Fedele Foundation in Milan.

The exhibition in tha ZAC is named

SHAY FRISCH

campo 121745_B/N as long as he used 121745 electrical adaptors.

The artist’s work involves shaping and manipulating energy by creating electric fields. The field is composed of a sequential assembly of ordinary electrical adaptors and conductors through which passing electricity takes on “shape.”

The aseptic industrial component is harnessed within modular repetition and transformed with electricity into a living, pulsating matter. The passage of electricity throughout the modules that make up the work, generates an electromagnetic field spreading out into the surrounding space, thus transforming these assemblies into energy generators, electrical fields that expand across space and emit their charge.

This is how the artist acts upon the space, creating a place imbued with induction, a field into which visitors may enter. The modules hold within an electrical charge whose perpetual activity is revealed by light indicators, bearing witness to a phenomenon in constant motion, to an act that unfolds live and never ends.

This project, conceived explicitly for ZAC, includes a sequence of installations found on the flooring and on the large backdrop wall. The project is also a tribute to the city of Palermo with an installation inspired by the architectural geometries of the nearby Zisa castle, which lends its name to ZAC.

Achille Bonito Oliva, the exhibition curator, writes: ” . . . Shay Frisch confirms minimal art’s primary line of investigation, with an analysis of the structural elements of painting and sculpture: light and space. His installations and works emphasize such an analysis, with an essential and phenomenal process of these two poles of the work as a concrete event. Light is highlighted, rendered volumetric through formal structuring which concretely frames and contains it in the space.

Ultimately, Shay Frisch’s ‘illuminated’ work illustrates great tension with the surrounding space. An intention vaporized in the space. As with Rothko’s painting, form comes undone before the viewer’s gaze and acquires a liquid and invasive force. The geometry of darkness opens its slits and hands traces and hints of light to us.

Therefore, this is the approach of an artist who, beginning from a wandering space, has adopted dynamism as a system intrinsic to that very space, a combination system of mobile rapports: the field creates connections between various points of the installation, entrusting its definition to the charge, to the flow of energy within the work. The visual advent of a prophecy, the philosophical one by Merleau-Ponty that announces temporal forms for contemporary art.

Intense spirituality marks the radically aniconic work of this Israeli artist, an epiphany suspended or slowed down . . . Shay Frisch turns on both the spirituality of form to the modularity of reason, and before our eyes there appears an inhabited silent field, a profound reason.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Skira.

The event is promoted by the Councillorship of Cultural Affairs of the City of Palermo, organized by the MESIME Association, in partnership with the Orestiadi Foundation and Agorà.