Page 3 - Lior Gal

Flowers of Perhaps 2022
Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts

A lac,c transforma,on from stone to flowers to ,me itself vibrates from edges of this collec,on of alabaster stones harvested from a
dried riverbed carving the Tuscan hills.
How Lior Gal came to choose these stones, alabaster precisely is like a performance linked to his earlier photographic works culled
similarly from nomadic solitary expedi,ons. Gal is an ar,st of uncompromising paMerns, like mys,cs before him, he searches out the
unseen, the liMle known, the excep,onally lost objects and moments, which coalesce in front of him and if believed in the forces
greater than our own, rising up before his eyes singing.
More importantly is the rhythm and tone of how his objects transpose forms from one language into another through his hands. Thus,
alabaster stones become flowers. Not just in the way these stones were used once by ancients to make lamps and windows, but with a
stubborn insistence that stone is a flower. On sub-atomic levels we now know the calcium in alabaster is the same as our bones, and
these chemical proper,es in the smallest elements are vibra,ng at the same level in all life forms. Stone is alive; we are one sea of
lac,c opaqueness all of us.
The constants are not holding, we have come through a period that makes this perfectly clear, so why not now let the magical and the
mys,cal open the thresholds of percep,on in all senses. Notwithstanding a future which is completely opaque, like seminal fluid, filled
with the milky poten,al of life in its con,nuity, star,ng and stopping like the thin flaky layers of stone that can peel away to reflect
almost transparent golden light.
An earlier version of this was placed in a small pie slice of land next to a concrete roadway in Leuven, Belgium, walled in like a lost bit of
landscape leV between buildings and off ramps considered more important than this leV-over bit of urban territory. His installa,on
created a chapel en plein air, by just having these stones reflec,ng daylight amidst this urban sprawl. How is such a thing possible, this
is magic and few can work in this way; with humility and knowing like the alchemists of the past who understood the way material
proper,es change. On some level, unthreatening, a terrain of disparate elements making one calm whole of unexpected grace.

But he dares something else here; the possibility of beauty, or nature finding its roots again, the possibility of unaligned things finding a
new coherence in maybe. This off-centre approach is both awkward and charming, a way that his work sets the viewer back, crea,ng a
distance while at the same ,me en,cing you to let the past go and find new roots in this s,ll very uncertain present.

This is the fer,le ground where Gal’s Flowers of Perhaps live - the imaginary possibili,es of forms changing, transforming from one that
we know to one that we can only imagine if we close our eyes and listen to what is unseen. In this half waking dream state alabaster
becomes a flower, it rises from the salty waters of our oceans. Like a seer, Gal has an insistent belief in his own percep,ons, they sooth
us like a lullaby and disarm at the same ,me.

With the speed of thought and belief this garden of stone flowers becomes our portal for a condi,on between things, a
perhaps that offers a new system of freedom on the edges where dialec,cal energies coalesce and new rela,onships float
into being. Offering momentary redemp,on of a kind, if one is a believer in any real sense, in any tradi,on you choose.