In the poem by the Chinese poet, Guo Han, the search has dissolved the distinction between the character who is seeking an object, and the object itself. Avi Ravitzki is a poet of the written word and form. He left his native country and settled in the South of France, an area filled with lush forests and vast skies, where the concrete is a world that should never be veiled.
These are imprinted in the thickness of the mountains and forests, where the self must never be hidden, where Ravitzki traces them in lyrical writing using vine tendrils, brushes, pencils, and ink, his cosmic vision containing in its richness the very conception of the void. Nature’s storm is an internal storm. The leaves of rice paper are spacious expanses, of lyrical experiences and pain, like a tree blown off by a storm, or the pesty attack inflicted on the leaves of the vine. The natural landscape all around, so close yet so foreign, remains in a state of perfect “is”, synonymous with emptiness, nothingness.
The bloom and shedding of leaves are contained in a world ruled by reason, where the only constant is the change taking place every day. Ravitzki left the cityscapes of Tel Aviv and Paris, making his home the forests of the South of France. His inner and artistic journey are expressed in his daily deeds and chores.
The work done out in nature, and the tending to the trees that produce truffles, resonate in the artist’s field of consciousness, and traced in cuneiform using fronds and tendrils collected from the vines, in black ink, which writes itself in freely, in a natural way, just until real pain rears The lyrical lines that emerge are all that is said, beyond words and above the artistic act. They bear witness to the daily search for another identity, in a different place. And vibrating in his very personal voice, rich in contradictions, which are perhaps many landscapes, storms, moments of joy and sadness. Ravitzki composes his poems in ink, charcoal, spots and stains. He scribbles the poem that he holds in his heart. The poem of an artist-turned-fieldworker as well as humble nomad.
Ravitzki’s drawings shatter urban and rural myths, they shatter the rocks that arround his studio and transform the artist into a painter / poet in search of a writing system that forms meaning. In Ravitzki’s works, art is transformed into a distant and highly contemporary culture. Another space, a secret, the winds of time concretely present.
Ravitzki’s works are intuitive, and it is up to us to discover what lurks beyond that which is left unsaid. Ravitzki manages to simplify all of the rumblings of his consciousness, using that which is happening all around him.