Joseph Loven – Soft pastel paintings

By Dorit Kedar

The use of pastel chalk colours is indicative of an inherent intention of Joeseph

Loven’s to avoid running aground in fallacies of medium, but rather to follow with the
material so as to effect an ultimate sense of immateriality.

This renunciation of materiality is made in a language that has chosen a non-

figurative means of expression. A kind of harmonic chaos happens upon the paper, speaking
in splashes of colour that belie their own mediality, and in various lines that cut across the
space of the paper, lines that are, however, austerely engendered, with nothing raucous
about them.

The quintessence of works of this kind can be comprehended if the viewer is willing
to enter into the specific spirit of the work, not rationally, but rather in a more nearly
intuitive manner. Thus, for example, he might encounter a storm of colour brewed by two
shapes shrouded in black, red and purple bellowing out of a larger grey mass. A gust
representing a kind of clearing tends to pinks, rather as though it was the implementation of
a pink precedent in the black area at the top. Everything here is consistently in motion,
eluding precise explanation, definition or definitiveness.

Closure is not one of the principles at work here. Various formations open so as to
swallow ostensibly intrusive hostile colour-zones, or perhaps it is mists of primal void that
are dissolving, broken up by a line which is a thin ray of light, tidings, as it were, of rapport
between the upper and lower zones, between Heaven and Earth.

The laying down of the chalk too is not absolutistic, and gives a sense of
forethought, restraint and a relaxed touch. It is this absence of over-delineation that enables
one to feel the nearly magical sense of fluency, like dreams wrought of some primeval
insubstantiality.

These works are intentionally untitled, so as not to lead the viewer, but rather to
allow him to rove unhindered wherever his senses may take him.

Loven does not think rationally about his works, that is to say, he does not contrive
them purposefully, but rather creates out of an inner urge: in fact his best paintings are
those which most clearly bear the stamp of this naturalism – they are made in a certain way
because any other way is simply unthinkable. The best way to appreciate these paintings is
for the viewer to empty himself of thought, letting the painting as a whole seep into him.
Indeed, he need hardly do anything else to be transported.

Translated from Hebrew by: Zvi Mermelstein