Page 22 - Lior Gal

Flowers of Perhaps
Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts

A lactic transformation from stone to flowers to time itself vibrates from edges of this collection 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 expeditions. Gal is an artist of uncompromising patterns, like mystics before him, he searches out the unseen, the little known, the exceptionally 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 properties in the smallest elements are
vibrating at the same level in all life forms. Stone is alive; we are one sea of lactic 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 mystical open the
thresholds of perception in all senses. Notwithstanding a future which is completely opaque, like seminal fluid, filled with the milky potential of life in its
continuity, starting 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 left
between buildings and off ramps considered more important than this left-over bit of urban territory. His installation created a chapel en plein air, by just
having these stones reflecting 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 properties 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, creating a distance while at the same time enticing
you to let the past go and find new roots in this still very uncertain present.

This is the fertile ground where Gal’s Flowers of Perhaps live - the imaginary possibilities 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 perceptions, they sooth us like a lullaby and disarm at the same time.

With the speed of thought and belief this garden of stone flowers becomes our portal for a condition between things, a perhaps that offers a new system of
freedom on the edges where dialectical energies coalesce and new relationships float into being. Offering momentary redemption of a kind, if one is a believer
in any real sense, in any tradition you choose.