TEL AVIV.- The paintings featured in this exhibition by Oren Eliav, recipient of the 2010 Rappaport Prize for a Young Painter, follow upon the paintings included in the exhibition "They'll Never Wake Us in Time," which took place in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2010. In both cases, Eliav's works raise questions related to time and temporality – both by disrupting our sense of historicity, and by creating a "duration" related to an imagined sound. The exhibition is on view until June 25, 2011 in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Eliav's works create a semblance of the past, a "disconcerting familiarity", which is based on the collective memory etched into the viewer's consciousness. Sustained observation of these paintings, however, reveals an intermediate space, which the artist describes as "A limbo between worlds, which is not subject to conventional historical rules." Many of the paintings, such as the portraits of the "Listeners" (2011), create an illusion of sound, of an echo resonating throughout the exhibition space.

Oren Eliav's paintings are concerned, among other things, with the disturbance of vision, which is often divested of its traditional functions. Eliav ascribes great importance to the translation of the visible; this act of translation, however, becomes a means of disruption rather than a description of what is seen.

Eliav depicts those things that cannot be fully grasped, that which is absent or missing. His works evolve around the gap between the seen and the unseen – a space that is the locus of an elusive truth, which cannot be captured solely by the eye.