Moshé Elimelech

Moshé Elimelech was exposed to the artistic process by observing his father’s technique as a master craftsman. He began his course of study at the Avni Art Institute in Israel and then went on to study at The Polytechnic Institute of Design in Tel Aviv. After two and a half years in the army working as an Art Director for the Israeli army publication house, Maarachot, Elimelech went on to Paris where he assisted the internationally known artist Yaakov Agam.

Elimelech has dedicated himself to the investigation of formal elements making use of a strong foundation in design. He has explored a variety of mediums including drawing, gouache, oil, and watercolor. Ultimately, he began making a robust statement in acrylic painting, utilizing a sculptural substrata which involves a playful, interactive engagement with his audience.

Elimelech was selected as a contributing artist for the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 and is a recipient of the Windsor Newton award by the Watercolor West Society. In addition to his current studio practice as a fine artist, Elimelech’s design work has been featured internationally, in galleries and museums, such as the Palm Springs Desert Museum; Las Vegas Art Museum; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Korean Cultural Center; Galley 825; Gallery C; and at the MOCA exhibit "Fresh"; as well as in the museum stores of MoMA in New York; MOCA in Los Angeles; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

He resides with his wife, fashion designer Shelli Segal, and family in Burbank,
California.

Artist Bio

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2012 - LA Artcore Gallery, Los Angeles, CA "Arrangements"

2012 - L2Kontemporary, Los Angeles, CA “Geometric Geographics”

2008 - Gallery 825, Los Angeles, CA “Reflections”, installation

2007 - L2Kontemporary, Los Angeles, CA

2002 - The Gallery, Los Angeles, California

2002 - Sylvia White Gallery-Los Angeles, CA

1998 - Hakikar Gallery, Jafa, Israel

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2013 - Gallery 825, Los Angeles, CA, "Das Paar"

2011 - Art Gate Gallery, "Summer Kaleidoscope", New York, NY

2010 - Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA

2010 - Gallery 825, Los Angeles, CA

2010 - Gothelf Art Gallery, "From Desert to Desert", La Jolla, CA

2009 - Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, “From There to Here”, Los Angeles, CA

2007 - Adamar Fine arts, Miami Florida

2007 - Gallery 825, Los Angeles, CA

2006 - Gallery 33, Long Beach, CA

2006 - Gallery 825, “"Summer Kaleidoscope", Los Angeles, CA

2005 - Don O’Melveny Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2005 - Gallery C, “Touch Me”, Hermosa Beach, CA -

2004 - Keller&Greene Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2003 - Don O’Melveny Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2002 - Don O’Melveny Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2002 - The Gallery, Los Angeles, California

2002 - City of Brea Gallery, Brea, CA

2002 - Soapbox Gallery, Venice, CA

2001 - Sylvia White Gallery-Los Angeles, CA

The Play of Logic, The Logic of Play

By Peter Frank

Geometricism is probably the least well-understood idiom in modern and contemporary art. Viewers assume that it is ruled by logic, if not by mathematics, and is thus devoid of human feeling, absent of humor, and resistant to the involvement of spectators. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.

Artists reliant on a geometric formal language have produced some of the wittiest and most genial, even endearing art of our time. Indeed, most artists who employ vocabularies of simplified shapes exploit the very simplicity of those shapes – and accompanying colorful palette – as a means of allowing ready visual comprehension, while playing cleverly against the supposed austerity of the geometric forms they use. The humor is as much architectural, or even musical, as it is purely visual. In any case, it is widespread, thoroughgoing, and very charming – but not at all superficial.

This in a nutshell describes Moshe Elimelech’s oeuvre. A designer by trade and in spirit, Elimelech is driven by visual and structural imagination (although his work engages a remarkable amount of personal expression, evident most readily but not exclusively, in his watercolors). His paintings – which dramatically engage certain sculptural qualities – are, if anything, toys, devices to share play with his audience. Elimelech’s installations extend the principles of his paintings into the realm of spectacle. And his flat works – watercolors in particular – remain suspended between the seen world and the imagined, drawing in the eye by bridging idiosyncratic conditions of pure structure and observed reality.

A sense of elegance suffuses throughout Elimelech’s work, to be sure, a unifying earmark of his sensibility; but this elegance is a given, not a goal, a tool towards elucidating his broader purpose. It almost serves as a “secret identity,” the cool clarity of a painting masking the sense – indeed, the guiding principle – of play that reveals itself on closer inspection. His installations, with their reliance on reflection and their goal of at-least partial spectator disorientation, make more evident Elimelech’s devotion to the ludic, but their minimalist aspects also assure a certain initial distance between them and the viewer. Even the watercolors, rendered in a medium whose gentle colors and silky texture (not to mention the sensuousness of their paper) Elimelech fully exploits, do not reach out to us with any great extravagance. Small, quietly rendered, and dependent on patterns of striation that are as rigorous as they are rhythmic, the watercolors’ seduction of the viewer’s eye is no less gradual than the other, larger works’. Nothing is as rigid or minimal or decorative as it first seems – not nearly.

Astute viewers will observe that, for all the brittle modernity that apparently attends to Elimelech’s work, he is in fact something of a traditionalist. The “modernity” he practices is rooted not in latter-day stylistic indulgences, but in the integral concepts of design we associate with a modernity older than we are. He upholds and re-energizes the classic modern tradition – making him, if anything, a “neo-modernist.” His lucid, elemental sense of form and composition hark back a good century, but in practice it roots itself more in the concepts and structures prevalent in the late 1950s and ‘60s, notably those associated with Op and Kinetic Art. Also mindful of hard-edge painting and Minimalism, Elimelech pares away the elaborateness of so much Op and Kinetic work, focusing instead on its basic structural clarity. He thus seeks to surprise rather than to bedazzle. Elimelech also draws on the ready, rather than spectacular, involvement of the audience in the process of discovery and play into which Op and Kinetic Art characteristically brings us. His installations, for instance, rely on no optical tricks, at least none we don’t or can’t anticipate; rather, they elaborate on easily comprehended visual anomalies, elemental enough in their arrangement to explain themselves to anyone while still delighting everyone’s eye. There is magic to these artworks, to be sure; but Elimelech the magician relies on the compliance and even assistance of his audience – and assures it with his uncluttered style.

Only the watercolors rely on a “magic” for which the viewer does not share such responsibility. Even in the most minimal of the works on paper, Elimelech’s handwork is pictorial rather than purely constructive. In the watercolors he presents us with visual information notably more varied and detailed than in his paintings or installations – refined and even restrained information, to be sure, but interpretive and whimsical in their reliance on imagery rather than logical and structured. The spectators’ role here is physically more passive than it is in the paintings – the arrangement of whose elements we manually determine – or the installations – whose effects on us change (profoundly) depending on where and how we position ourselves. The watercolors present us with the familiar, non-relational condition of traditional pictoriality. But all art is relational; the circumstances of any artwork affect us variously, depending on who we are and how we approach it. As Duchamp insisted, the viewer completes the work of art. In his other work Elimelech makes this matter eminently apparent, even (with the viewer’s physical engagement) the heart of the matter; in the watercolors the viewer’s vantage is imagined into the images themselves, reflected in Elimelech’s own delicate fantasies.

If the watercolors are built up of fixed elements, safe, as it were, from the intervention of their audience, the paintings’ mutability is echoed and even magnified by their immutable factors: the shapes and colors with which Elimelech has invested them. No matter how stolid or symmetrical their array, those shapes and colors are vibrant and active – vibrant and active, that is, in a manner that does not depend on our intervention, but plays off it even while benefiting from it. When we rearrange the elements in an Elimelech painting-structure, we are engaged with a visual presence as active as we are; having projected his visual spirit into the structure, Elimelech invites us to do the same, and thus propagates the game through more than just its rules. It may be his game, but everyone wins. It’s thus appropriate to call these paintings “arrangements,” underscoring the conditionality of their appearance: dependent on the active handling of many people, not just one, their abiding arrangeability is as important as is their arrangement at any given time.

The installations propose the most unstable of all Elimelech’s circumstances, one in which, at least within their boundaries, there is no fixity whatsoever. They do not build upon or even imply chaos, but they do rely on continual fluid variation. The compositional principle at work here is not ludic so much as choreographic, its fixed elements functioning not as formative ingredients but de-formative ingredients amidst which the main formative ingredient – you – loses and re-finds itself.

The three realms of Moshe Elimelech’s current artistic investigation, then, distinguish themselves one from another not simply in their shape and function, but in their sense and meaning. They are philosophically as well as experientially diverse. The continuity they display between one another is a continuity of sensibility, a neo-modernist sense of design and play – not just playful design, 
or even playful modernism, but playful perception, a spirit that values active engagement, hands-on or no, even as it relies on and champions geometry, structure and logic. Elimelech may draw a hard line, but he does so with a wink.

The Counterpoint of Incident and Intention

By Ezrha Jean Black

The hard-ruled lines and strict (if not exactly hard-edged) geometrics of Moshé Elimelech’s water-colours belie the mutability of their configurations, the variation of form, structure, and (naturally) colour that plays out within their softly delineated edges. There’s a musicality – both in the rhythmic structuring and pacing of the horizontal and vertical elements, with the occasional syncopation of linear, fractal or chromatic elements, and the chromatic progressions in themselves. The rectilinear austerity is offset by the sense of visual surprise, the unexpected flash of colour or a momentarily deepened saturation. Everywhere expectations are challenged or confounded: a pure line of colour giving way to a gradient; the continuous line continually interrupted.

The rhythm is plainly stated in the studies configured as rectangular arrays. You feel the musicality – the lead-in on a chromatic note, the intensification. Flecks of color spark across registers, while another fades from one column to the next; and soft grays elide to charcoal and black – like a long sustained note.

As willfully abstract as these colour studies obviously are, they cannot elude the suggestion of environmental influence. Tryptich No. 6 – this broken into a rectangular array of three evenly spaced columns – suggests a fragmentary landscape – physically continuous, but interrupted temporally. A long blue ribbon – pale at either end, like a body of water meets a narrow ribbon of white slicing a horizon line. The columns and horizontal registers mark transitions from one condition or time marking to another. One layer seems to refract against the next; and the artist seems determined to abstract it further with occasionally contrary, counter-intuitive coloration. Yet it coheres both as an image and in terms of its overall color harmony. The elements coalesce in a counterpoint of incident and intention.

If the diagonal markings indicate a ‘noise’ or static in the ‘signal,’ the gradient of ascending lights to darks in Untitled No. 9, suggests an illusionary recession from bottom to top or even a sense of falling, as the eye descends as abruptly as it moves forward. Instability, unpredictability prevail through this measured succession of lines and facets.

This is a pattern repeated through most if not all of Elimelech’s water-colours – the simultaneity of something completely abstract, yet sliced from the physical world; and with it the sense of both arbitrary disconnection from that world, whether interior or exterior, and the sense of a virtually infinite line and series of progressions and regressions. We have seen this before in drawing, but less frequently involving colour.

The ‘zero-sum’ for Elimelech might in fact be exactly what it has been for artists from Reinhardt to Stella. Finally he appears to abandon the hard-ruled registers altogether, as if they existed only to set off the dark chromatic drama within the square (Untitled No. 21). Here, heavy indigos, charcoal gray and black, elide hesitantly but dramatically into deepest amethysts, russets, ambers, umbers, and even a soft gray-blue. We see the deliberated progression or regression here. There’s a luminosity to this darkness. The randomness of the ruled lines seems to confirm the chromatic evidence. Indeterminacy rules this geometry.

Moshe Elimelech-Design into Art

By Constance Mallinson

The definitive look of clean, elegant surfaces, polished aluminum, bright prismatic colored cubes sporting simple graphic shapes, and orderly gridded arrangements might initially brand Moshe Elimelech’s painted wall sculptures as Neo-Modernist. Indeed formally and aesthetically they recall high Modernists such as Victor Vassarely or Yaacov Agam - Elimelech actually worked as an assistant for Agam from 1969 to 1970 before beginning his long graphic design career. Influenced by the changing perspectives and retinal effects typical of these “op artists”, Elimelech houses his unattached cubes within grids of open black velvet boxes with the intention of encouraging the viewer to endlessly recompose them in ways that seem mathematically infinite: wavy hard edge lines shimmy vertically and horizontally; subtle color gradations are punctuated with stark black and white geometry; architectural forms constantly arise and fall; a Malevichian tilted black square may quickly morph into a “picture” resembling a stark urban landscape photograph. Such constantly fluctuating references and patterns actually break down and challenge pictorial hierarchies and situate his practice within Postmodern discourse and debates concerning the nature and function of the artist, and the role and legacy of design in contemporary art. 

Throughout the Modernist era the relationship between high art and design was frequently contested, design being most closely identified with consumer products and architecture, and fine art resolutely opposing the values of mainstream culture. In the early twentieth century, the distinctions became less important as the Bauhaus, the Russian Constructivists even the Bloomsbury group sought to undo what Walter Gropius termed the “arrogant barrier” between craftsman, artists, and designers to create a total work of art that was a synthesis of all arts. As the postwar avant-garde resumed its goals of challenging status quo values, the arrogant barrier between design and fine art was reinstated, perhaps out of necessity to preserve art’s critical capabilities and a sense of individualism in a Cold War conformist atmosphere. Leading critics like Clement Greenberg assured art viewers that the bold Color Field paintings he so championed in the early 1960’s were not just snappy wall graphics but strict manifestations of the unique “pure” properties of painting and a logical outcome of painting’s historical progression to define its flatness. Minimalist sculptors such as Sol Lewitt made liberal use of architectural and design elements but distinguished their efforts from “mere” design by an emphasis on precise definitions and qualities of sculpture. Clearly Elimelech’s crisply painted modules are indebted to that period’s post-painterly abstraction and the Minimalistic systems approach to sculpture.

By the late 1960’s, such cool formal investigations began to be undermined by a poststructural, deconstructionist dialogues that questioned the fixity of language and the underlying meanings and assumptions of texts. In art the emergence of multiple influences, narratives, and formerly suppressed voices allowed for a sense of playfulness with form, ideas, content, and sources from kitsch to exotic cultures, politics to design. Elimelech’s interactive game-like constructions destabilize high Modernist values such as progress, originality, and the work of art as a permanent monument to genius. Elimelech’s viewer-collaborative artworks are never completed but are instead fields of perpetual change . They elicit metaphors for a human existence full of pleasure, surprise, and the constant possibility of new meanings, with beautiful design the means to that engagement.