For his first Israeli solo exhibition, Shadow of a Doubt, Guy Moshayov presents us with a strange and uncertain land. His playful and, at times, enigmatic paintings depict a locale of tenuous humanity. Abrahamic mythologies of Genesis collide, merge, and collapse across several large-scale canvases.

Drawing from the visual language of new figuration and his early love of comic books, Moshayov fills his landscapes with characters who evoke both the first and the last humans on Earth. Genesis hovers as an overarching element – most notably, The Binding of Isaac, and Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden. The Binding of Isaac in particular is a recurrent theme throughout the paintings. Mirroring the narrative structure of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, wherein the Binding of Isaac is told and retold as a vehicle for analyzing this momentous event in Abrahamic history, Moshayov’s paintings recreate the Binding, though with a notably different outcome. In Moriah Sunset, we find Isaac beheaded, and Abraham looking on with a mix of euphoria and abject horror. In Grand Father, Isaac’s head regards Abraham, who hunches, pathetic and menacing, as he feasts on fruit falling from the carcass of a sacrificial ram.

Moshayov’s process is one of seeking and erasure. An image is found and promptly disestablished. Then, from its fragments, a new, unexpected composition comes forth. This layering, which indicates the rich history of Moshayov’s process, leads to surfaces both tactile and ephemeral, emphasizing the ‘objecthood’ of the works. The paintings, with their mixture of frenzied marks and lurid pallets, invite the viewer to reexamine those myths on which we have built cultures and nations. They express the artist’s persistent and unrelenting desire to question: what if it had been otherwise?

Curatorial Text by Alessandra Acierno