DORON LIVNE
Text from the catalog "THROUGH", 2004
"Tel Aviv Artists' House"

IN A PICTURE'S STEAD

In the last three decades, the complexity of Orna Millo's works evolves around an empty space. This complexity becomes richer and all encompassing as it attempts to fill up the space. Filling up is similar to filling in, to replace. When an emptied place is filled up again it is no longer the same place.

A picture is by nature a replacement. It copies reality and comes in its stead thus changing the order of things. That is why biblical law forbids the creation of images.

Where does the picture "place" the artist and the spectator? Neither "here" nor "there". But Orna Millo does not accept this fact as in the nature of things and she bangs her head against the wall which ostensibly divides the space into "here" and "there". Like a gecko she tries to climb the wall only to discover and re-discover that the wall she is trying to invent is not there: the glass, net, horizontal lines in long and thin formats with nothing above and nothing below return Millo to the recognition that she is simultaneously on both sides of the "wall". She passes through, inwards, into the picture and outwards to where she presents performances, where she "proves" herself, present and vital.

The painter's vocation is to present, to show. In this sense Orna Millo is a meta-painter in that her painting is constructed on and founded in the impossibility of presentation.

Doron Livne is an Artist, a member of AGRIPAS 12 Cooperative Gallery and a teacher at Bezalel Academy of Art