Nahum HaLevi
Scintillating Songlines from Sinai

This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Shmuel and Clara Bennett

The thrust and focus of my paintings is an attempt to grasp the transcendent meaning of the Hebrew Bible, and by extension to use art as a tool to try to understand the underlying nature, structure and essence of the universe. As a template for this process I attempt to visually express the biblical narrative by deriving multiple images from multiple translations of the original Modern Hebrew text, and at times retranslate the words back into ancient Hebrew and further back into proto-Sinaitic pictographic Hebrew.

For some paintings I fuse images and words from disparate scriptures thereby creating fusion imagery of disparate biblical characters and concepts in different historical space-time coordinates into one holistic story. By retaining fragments of the different stories, each individual story is told, and a new creative story is told for the first time, providing multiple layers of meaning to the original stories.

In some paintings , I use the principle of taking stories of individual characters from sequential chronological periods of their lives and jumbling them up into one narrative as though each story is a single point in the space-time continuum, and lives not only in the past or future, but in the never ending present.

"I personally view every two-dimensional biblical canvas as a small bird's eye view of the vast space-time continuum. Different splashes of paint and letters all represent different points scattered in space and time, existing separately and yet simultaneously, all splayed out in a microcosm before our frail visual fields allowing us to grasp past, present and future in simultaneity, as they twinkle, coexist and meld into one unified coherent whole giving us a multifaceted perception of infinitely changing realities- dare we say a fragmentary glimpse of God."