The Oracle w/ Eran Barnea @ TAG Gallery
Eran Barnea presents us a confrontation of vanity in his welcomed exhibition as part of the Fall Reception at TAG Gallery. His aim at representing, though certainly in a mischievous manner, the haloed self-gratification of personalities creating their own electromagnetic vortices of grandeur, requires one to openly examine the health of such a now normative occupancy in so many people’s lives in the Western World. Indeed, the hagiography presents us with a sheer clash with divine imagery altogether.
To think of the Christian icon as a form of communion with the Divine Spirit of the Lord of Creation towards its transition to the ability for mediocrity to concoct their own imagery of excellence, can’t help but put a smile on one’s face. It is the sheer audacity at being so blind to the gratification that canonizes in one’s own contemporary experience with social media the deluge of delusion of those lost in a transient world of self-adoration. Typically, for instance, young women are arrested to entertaining a microcosm of male gaze, to serve what ulterior motivation? What is the goal of the narcissist but to enjoy the cocoon he or she is incubated in?
What is the goal of the artist but to burst its catacombic cobwebs?
It is this healthy vigor with Mr. Barnea approaches the Western World and its youth’s helpless self-gratification. It certainly raises a moral claim about the future possibilities being inhibited by these “creators” in being able to support others. When one is so self-absorbed towards producing gratitude for oneself alone with no focus on gratifying others, how can children be nourished?
We immediately can rest our minds in knowing that such a batch of folly is turned this way through the abrupt introduction of electromagnetism at levels which the normal person is unacquainted with ever acquiring. The “one to many” spectrum of natural authority, from the likes of chieftans to princes, has been naturally reserved at frequencies which are now available to all with a smartphone and a cute butt. The preparation for handling transcendental operations of electromagnetic causes inside of these machines, to networking with other persons brains, has not been inculcated into educational format despite there now being approaching a decade of these new “social network” effects on human bodies.
The absence of “holiness” in educational curriculum through public education is seen on full display with so many youth electing to manifest apparitions of happiness when there is severe risk of electromagnetic disturbance to their brain’s reflexive awareness of other people’s worlds. Being trapped in a subjective tomb where others are mere objects for one’s self-gain erupts as the golden leafy iconography of the ancient Christian religion fades from memory. The question the philosopher raises: is this by choice or by instructed habit? Being blind to vanity is a Western Civilized idea which is successfully re-visited.
Mr. Barnea almost reduces his tease to a comedical effect in Self-Portrait, of a repudiation of material dogma that all a man can know and therefore can be is through his senses. That invisible beauty, imperceivable to any organ, is more than real, but alive in constant current with the Natural Order, is what a humanly conscious perception can only grasp through reason alone. It is this friction, certainly, in the spirit of Western Man and the torrential thirst for social gratification by some which promotes such an ultimatum: is man more than beast? If he is, then let us separate him from the concept of homo sapien and the gratification of being perceived by limited minds. The mind of God alone is sufficient.