Erez Aharon

Gordon Gallery is pleased to present Erez Aharon's upcoming solo show, Transect, at Gordon Gallery New York.

A red thread, stretched between nails on a “hospital green” wall, traces geometric contours. Its shadow trembles just beside it, echoing the fragile boundary it marks.

Borders are never stable: they are negotiated, politicized, fought over. To leave them blurred is often in the interest of one side—or both. Erez Aharon’s new body of work, Transect, scales the outlines of twenty-four of the towns and villages in southern Israel that experienced deadly attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Their borders are not defined by roads or municipal perimeters, but by what the Israeli military calls shvil tishtush—a transect, “blur path” of leveled earth placed along a frontier. Designed as a line of defense, it registers incursions through the traces of footsteps, declaring both the edge of a community and its vulnerability.

The thread recurs across Aharon’s practice. In 2016, in his series Eruv, he juxtaposed physically similar cities—often profoundly distant in other ways, such as Rishon LeZion and Tehran, Rehovot and Khan Yunis—and traced their borders. The title referred to the ritual boundary drawn with wire around cities, which allows observant Jews to carry objects within it on the Sabbath. The use of red thread also evokes the Kabbalistic red string tied around the wrist for good fortune, and the biblical scarlet thread Rahab tied to her house to mark it for protection.

These works are not memorials. They are an investigation of painting itself. The canvases oscillate between abstraction and concreteness: the naturalistic rendering of thread, nails, wall, and shadow, and the actual places they refer to. Abstraction entwines with figuration; the impulse to depict contends with the impossibility of representation. In this paradox, Aharon’s works hold the condition of painting in wartime.

Erez Aharon (b. 1974) lives in Rishon LeTsiyon and works in Tel Aviv, Israel. Aharon studied at the Midrasha School of Art, at Beit Berl Academic College, under artist Israel Hershberg at the Jerusalem Studio School, and under Aram Gershuni at Hatahana Studio for figurative arts.