“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability…. To be alive is to be vulnerable.”

― Madeleine L’Engle

Nurit Avesar’s solo exhibition, “Elemental Energies,” exemplifies the power that creativity can impart when the artist is willing to approach her work by relinquishing control and embracing discovery. A reflection of her ongoing material exploration, Avesar’s latest series of mixed media paintings pulsates with a vibrant incandescence where splashes of color erupt up and out from roughly worked and layered surfaces that combine paint, paper, cheese cloth, and string with fabric, rust, graphite and window screening.

The initial steps in Avesar’s process are rudimentary and involve the thick application of acrylic paint along with paper to canvas. Once these materials dry, however, Avesar digs in with complete abandon by arming herself with an electric sander. According to Avesar, the doing is in the content, and the sander is just one aspect of her practice that underscores the physicality of her art-making.

The weathered textures Avesar achieves from the sander generate engaging patterns where sharp edges and rugged shapes interrupt the fluency of both color and texture. Even more, they evoke the long and cyclical nature of deposition and erosion. Far Away and Long Ago (2016) is exemplary of such, its tranquil palette a fluid blend of nuanced hues. Peering out from a harmonious blend of pastel blue, gray, and violet, fragments of white paper glisten like crystalized calcite exposed to natural sunlight.

Avesar also looks to a number of rigid utensils, such as a bamboo wok brush, to scrape through the impasto and various collaged elements that comprise her compositions. By aggressively assaulting and rigorously reworking each of her layered surfaces, she approaches her practice as an excavation of sorts, where the chance for discovery brings with it an unearthing of hidden histories.