Murmur
Avi Ifergan
2003
Assaf Romano appears to be walking “in the garden of diverging paths” that are secretly linked together. But in fact the link could be interpreted as “I do not believe in chance occurrences, because consciousness is alert to find materials that are of interest to it”. In a certain sense, Assaf Romano is a kind of collector of images. Images that appear in different wrappings, or images that were captured within a reproductive structure. The reproduction allows for emotional distance from the source, but the visual information reflects its derivation. The reproduction is found in the twilight area between the original source and the copy, between the triviality of the source and the preference for the copy, a pendulum of contemplations.
The source for Romano is sometimes a photograph by amateurs, an anonymous creation, a lost object, a snapshot by an information agency, or other sources. The reproductions are created from “existing images”; it is there in consciousness and in the world. The world and consciousness is a mirror facing a mirror and they serve Assaf Romano “like filters for pointing towards the question: What is man?”
Assaf intentionally avoids the framework of the classic Sisyphean photographer who searches for the new picture. “I am not interested in creating images”. The reproductions appear in the image configurations from a newspaper, such as the image of a boy lying in the street with his hands thrust into his genitals and exposed in puerile intimacy to the view of those passing by. The buttons of clothes belonging to unknown persons found along the edges of the street are signs at the same time of both the presence and absence of a body, a man, a passing stranger – “awareness of the aspect of time and loss”. The street creates images, the world creates images, and the images exist and appear there. Romano is intensely aware of their appearance through the exposed network of his conscious mind. The world reads you and reads your consciousness.
The accumulated creations of Assaf Romano diverges into “paths”, the “path of lost buttons”, the “path of the abstract painting, which destroys the image”, the “path of the flowerpots” which is a kind of
reflection of a message deranged by the geometric presence of institutions of power. Unpleasant places that divert the glance from the beautiful and the enjoyable, and blur the experience of consciousness for a short while.
The flowerpots reflect the essence, horrifying in its severity, of the institutions in which they are found, and the essence of the place to which they are attached. The flowerpots therefore become the mirror
image of man who enters into the corridors of these powers. The “existing images” become, again and again, the reflective picture of the state of man and of the state of the world.
There are certain aspects in Romano’s paintings of the abstract image, abstract things or abstract objects: “The painting is autonomous in itself and deals with the story of itself. The lack of an image, which does not exist in the photograph, serves me as a Supplement. The thing that I call “thing”, a spots of color I see as the paintings of things. I have an experience of what are almost objects, like the two-dimensionality of the three-dimensional”.
The Murmur is the hidden secret of the diverging paths.