Nili Patish

Lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel. Married and a mother. 

Rorschach

“Self Reference” works that are actualized by photography that reframes and distorts an image.

Though presented as photographs, the works displayed on the site are created using a mixed technique. While photography constitutes the final stage of the creative process, the raw material, the object photographed, is a painting or a drawing.

The camera--restricting the viewers’ gaze to a specific fragment of the original image and controlling the manner in which they view it--is responsible for generating the manipulation that fractures the original object/image.

The goal is not to create the right images, true images, captured by the camera’s lens, but rather to construct an artificial scene created by the “fusion” or “amalgamation” of the two mediums: the painting/drawing and its counterpart, photography.

In the interest of leaving ever-expanding space for the viewers’ interpretation of the final image created, the works were not named, but only numbered. Hence: “Rorschach”.

The works deal with questions concerning the gap between initial intention and final result, and they try to examine the territory that spans between comprehension and memory.

The creative process consists of two-stages: conventional painting or drawing that produces a result that is then situated in a variety of aesthetic settings; and then, at this point, the camera enters the process to frame and capture a “new” image, a somewhat coincidental image that deforms--in the most meaningful way--the original image. The photographic image created by the camera is the final image and is not further treated or manipulated in any way or form.

The drawings or paintings are created on a material “substratum” that is already charged with meaning, that is to say, a substratum that is not neutral and that already contains a narrative that could impact the result of the drawing or painting. This material substratum could be strips of newspaper ads or newspaper pages, or original photographs taken by Nili, and in some instances even earlier image-photography work forged with the same cross-medium technique. Scrupulous observation will uncover foreign elements of imagery beneath the work’s surface. These elements are the “ready made” images that came with and on the base material that served as the substratum for the works.

The final image, the photograph, is printed on a format that is much larger than the original format. This magnification exposes traces and elements of the manual work: the pressure of the ball-pointed pen piercing and tearing the paper, the pencil strokes memorialized by smeared specs of graphite, the paper’s fine fiber, and so on. These exposed details convert the camera into a “magnifying glass” that draws near elements that the spectators’ eye would otherwise not see; and yet at the same time the camera also functions as an obstacle that stands in the way of a clear direct gaze at the original drawing--it creates distance, and impedes the possibility of an independent gaze. 

Note: all works have been created after July 2012.