By: Sophia Dekel Caspi

Lior Shtainer, painter, entrepreneur and curator (owner of Gallery 121, 2010-2012), looks for signs of human interaction in situations lacking communication with the immediate environment.

Shtainer, graduate of the Beit Berl Academy of Arts, stages a scene on a dim natural background. Two figures and two partial figures are sitting away from each other on the branches of a tree growing out of a can of paint, in the heart of the composition. A headless figure sits besides another figure, in a gesture that might be understood as an attempt to explain something. But the look is turned to the side, maintaining the distance. On the other side - a bodyless head, lightly placed on a branch tip, facing a colorful bird. The eyes, as well as the gestures, do not meet. Nothing happens. A deaf dialogue.

The scene is poetic - a tree (of knowledge, of life, of death), figures (complete and amputated), sitting in a gesture of expectation taken from the world of absurdity, or from Samuel Beckett’s classical play Waiting for Godot (1947-1948). The monochrome, greys and greens, is broken with a touch of pink and white. These latter tones are repeated in places connected by a dark line, creating the shape of a cross with a fractioned top.

The background is watery, puddle-like, except for a free sketch hovering above the figures set in Western culture, sitting outside time, aimlessly, on a branch. Some kind of past aura or just the imagination endlessly producing barren hope.