Judgment Day, 2018 – 2022

Judgment Day, a monumental painting by Neta Harari Navon, consists of wooden panels that coalesce into a large-scale composition with no single, stable center. The viewer’s gaze wanders among its parts, which offer different readings of what is transpiring. The work, which includes 18 panels in its entirety, centers on a centrifugal movement. The current installation, which has been adapted to the Nehushtan Pavilion, features 12 panels in a new arrangement that undoes the original movement. The result does not allow for a single, distinct narrative, pointing instead to a chaotic sphere that is rife with tension and giving rise to a host of coexisting situations, temporal moments and perspectives. The natural, familiar order is destabilized and undermined: God no longer resides in the heavens, with the underworld extending below as in the original installation; instead, they intermingle.

The work dialogues with medieval and Renaissance portrayals of the Last Judgment, including Michelangelo’s fresco by that name, in which heaven and hell are presided over by Jesus as the ultimate judge. The absence of the word “The” from the title of Harari Navon’s painting questions the existence of an ultimate judgement, while pointing to the responsibility of human beings for their deeds throughout life, and not only at its end. As she states, “I love the term Judgment Day because it attempts to order the world and what happens to us humans suspended between Heaven and Earth, life and death – evil, goodness, morality, justice.”

The exposed patches of gesso, the white underlayer of Harari Navon’s oil painting, serve in some instances to conceal and reveal layers of the painting, while giving rise to a constant tension between the visible and the invisible, and between smooth and fragmented expanses. The images themselves appear in some instances as solid, almost petrified, while in other instances they appear to dissolve and liquefy, underscoring the impact of time on matter and the tension between presence and absence, memory and loss. In addition to Judgment Day, the exhibition features four works from the series “Cocoon Fantasy,” which pursues the concern with mythological images, the exposure and concealment of painted layers, and figures moving between protection, vulnerability and transformation. Rather than representing a single story, they form a repository of vestiges, traces and layers attesting to processes of deconstruction, attrition and reconstruction. Like archaeological excavations and the historical findings on display in the Nehushtan Pavilion, the work functions as a sphere of exposure and accumulation. Meaning and time are constructed out of fragmented, partially exposed layers and remains. The reading arises out of the relations among the details, rather from a cohesive image portrayed in its entirety.

Day of Judgment was donated to MUZA, Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv, by Jacques Picard and Barbara Haering, Switzerland