The Freedom to Paint

The Exhibition “The Freedom to Paint”

This exhibition is a meeting, or rather, a series of meetings—perhaps even a crossroads of ideas—between two painters.

A dialogue of styles, a connection between generations, a confrontation of works, and above all, a meeting of women that creates a convergence of emotion and intellect, combining various forms and colors.

How, from the same starting point, from the same nurturing environment, do two distinct perspectives, two different interpretations of reality, arise?

Where does realism end, and where does its interpretation begin? Is there an objective world, or are there countless alternative realities, all legitimate, even before we are born, as “permission granted”?

Magritte, in his statement about the essence of painting, raises the discussion about the differences between the abstract—which explores the balanced relationship in painting and its subject—and the surrealist, free from restrictions and boundaries.

Francine Lassry

Born in Tunis in 1940, Francine is an artist and a teacher of many students. She currently resides in the artist village of Ein Hod.

Francine sees minimalism and abstraction as the pure core of painting. She describes the painting experience as a journey driven by excitement, exploration, and inner feelings, allowing, in moments of rest, the laws of intellect to intervene, focus the eye, and direct it to the center.

Her creative process oscillates between rhythm and pause, between organizing and centering a storm of emotions and colors. The composition is complete when the same enthusiasm and joy unify with the severe formulation of the relationship between objects and colors on the canvas, culminating in a final confession.

Muriel Lassry

Born in Tunis in 1941, Muriel immigrated to Israel in 1964 from Paris. She graduated in architecture from the Technion and currently resides in Jerusalem.

Her creative journey leads her to imagined views of her surroundings.

The work process is a struggle between leading the brush with her experienced hand and its seemingly independent movement towards an imagination that distances from the spectacle of life, allowing different perspectives and a release from the shackles of rules and limitations, creating surrealism—or perhaps another interpretation of the world—blending times and places in painting, as a conversation or interaction between elements that build life experiences.

Between the abstract and the surrealist, between the emotional and the intellectual, between various perspectives and techniques, as the wise Talmudic scholars used to ask for the opinion of a young child on unresolved disputes—so the works of Alon Richter, a young and special boy, with fresh and original reflections on reality arising from a rich and colorful inner world, shed light on our topic.