White Days
2025
White days
On Hirschfeld's palette, the color white is placed, it covers many colors and erases everything, flashes of light slip through it, but it is not a white of silence, of calm and tranquility. It is a white that does not speak of the future and does not deal with the past. Hirschfeld's white is not here to communicate with the moment and yet it is the white of the present.
Within the painting there are spaces in which a mother and daughter, the Laocoon and his sons, are created, but in fact they are not. The white, exists in the void and erases itself. A kind of nothingness of man in the face of the infinite, the sublime.
Hirschfeld creates distance, through myth he plants the autobiographical. The line of life is revealed. The painting of the Tower of David that his grandfather painted, holds on to the roots but immediately slips away.
It is precisely through distance that one can feel the heartbeat of a line, a stain, a paint-dripping.
The painting tries to speak in a world that has no language.
A painting of a painting of a painting of a sculpture.
In Goldberg's words, they are: "straight, high bridges between yesterday and tomorrow."
And although these paintings are as a period of transition, an empty field between the past and the future, the paintings are bearing the silence.
And as the heart gets used to itself, Hirschfeld wraps himself in the color white, like a lullaby, he soothes himself.
The drawings on paper, constitute the feeling of the formation of the family unit in the midst of the war, by highlighting the line of ink and charcoal. But in contrast to the white canvases, drawings of tenderness and innocence are created in shades of steel.
Through a synthesis of classical art and Israeli modernism, he fights the feeling of disappointment and despair.
The white covers a murky landscape but also protects the small family unit that was created within it.
Just as the figure of the Laocoön appeared to Michelangelo when it was found, a figure emerging from the mud, so too does Hirschfeld create the feeling of something appearing out of nothing
Shira Curiel
April 2025