Like Georges Braque, whose father was a housepainter specializing in materials and textures, Rubi Bakal came to painting by growing up in the workshop of plaster and industrial painting. From the start of his career, he has examined through his paintings the concept of “work,” the semantic gaps found in every painting between the mark of the housepainter’s technical and concrete roller, and the mark of the fine artist’s expressive and metaphorical paintbrush. While the act that serves as the basis of both categories is the same — the application of a colored solution to a surface — in the hands of the housepainter the act aims to assimilate with the real world and fade into an indistinct background, while in the fine artist’s hands the act strives to become the subject of the gaze and the main character on the stage of a dialogue of meaning.

Out of the three linguistic signs Charles Peirce enumerated in his time — symbol, icon, and index — Rubi Bakal is particularly dependent on the index, that sign which maintains a real physical relationship with what it represents. His interest in the Housepainter’s Abstract Painting, as he defines it, led him to a series of paintings whose subject was the housepainter, their tools and actions. This series included figurative paintings depicting plasterers and housepainters at work, alongside completely “abstract” compositions showing configurations of white putty applications over electrical connections and conduit tubing on colorful drywall panels.

These hybrid paintings, which combine a representational illusory language with a concrete material language, illustrate a world with cracks that need to be filled, a world in which the house/fine art painter is the restoring hero. If in the past, Rubi Bakal used a slow buildup of dust as a painting material, in the present exhibition’s paintings — which began concurrently with the events of the October 7 war — he discovered that time now interfered much more blatantly in his paintings. In place of the anonymous workers, images of hostages and their families began to appear, images of those doomed by today’s events to physically bear the world’s destruction and the hope to repair the world anew. Avihai Brodutch, Einav Zangauker, Fernando Merman, Luis Har, and many other survivors and protesters, unintentional heroes, embody in Rubi Bakal’s new paintings — as in the conscience of numerous Israelis — the chance for a new beginning.