Where to begin? From the painting of wild banquet tables in Holland of the seventeenth century? Or from the fires in the Jerusalem Hills in August 2021? Or the kitchen utensils of the poor in the paintings of Velasquez or the ridiculous wretchedness today of Coca Cola in a plastic cup? From the familiar comfort of the household wares in the paintings of Chardin or the role division in the kitchen between the man and the woman in the titles of the paintings of Reuven Zahavi? The paintings are rooted in the prosaic realism of the everyday, in the sense that “what you see is what there is”, although beyond the seemingly dry information, there is the humming of many thoughts, many time periods and there is a huge passion for the actual execution of the paintings (even if the passion is very refined). The world, apparently simple and exposed, is on a second glance saturated with hidden meaning. As such the painting is a visual study, a contemplation on the subject of wealth and poverty, nature and culture, feminine and masculine, order and destruction, the secular and the sacred. These are large and abstract subjects and Zahavi elicits theoretical thinking in order to reflect on them, but the theory does not stay on the intellectual level for there is poetry in the painting. Often a lamentation but also a joke. The painting becomes an image from a dream, a flash of beauty, and without losing the critical realism anchored in the Israeli present. A few examples will help to illustrate the emotional and conceptual density that is beyond the apparently innocent surface. In the painting “Freedom Eggs? She asked", three eggs lie on a black formica board and beside them a bunch of “black” grapes, and another four grapes separated from the bunch lie on a table near the formica. Behind this is a black silk screen. The title immediately colours the reading of the image in an ironical tone, signifies a specific social sector, charged with humane sensitivity with a little chuckle. But actually, in relation to painting, this is an interesting question, because it is asking about something that does not exist in the painting, about an abstract value that is impossible to represent visually. It is a question to which the painting cannot give an answer. The question, actually all the titles of the paintings, in the form of He Did or She Said, adds information outside the painting, not relevant to the content, and often even subverts, or deflects the focus from the visual to the verbal, and from the artistic space to the domestic space, usually the kitchen. Still life in the history of art is identified with the feminine space: food, cooking and serving utensils and the conversation of servants. The studio with the masculine space. Food is “feminine” - concrete, sensual, tasty, has odour and is physical. Painting is “masculine”, symbolic, restrained, signifying the material world, but is not part of it. Zahavi allows both these worlds to meet, often to merge, and often precisely to emphasize the difference between them. Back to “Freedom Eggs”. The egg is “bisexual”, both a testicle and a womb, potent and fertile. So what does she actually ask? The egg is also a perfect form, a model minimalistic creation of nature (similar to the eggplant and the artichoke in other paintings, or to flowers and shells in Dutch painting). Also a bunch of grapes has a grand history, even before Holland, in the paintings of Caravaggio, for example. Painters reached heights of virtuosity in representing the moisture of the taut skin of a grape bursting with the pressure of the transparent juice. Zahavi’s dry realism hints at this wonderful tradition, but his bunch is a bit naked, the grapes are a bit shriveled and those which stayed on the bunch sharpen the sense of forlorn emaciation that pervades the whole painting. The reflection in the formica apparently represents light and depth, but it also has been flattened, has been made banal in a certain way (especially when the cheap chipboard is discovered under the formica). Beyond the smile of Freedom Eggs there is an ephemeral still life, forlorn, and poor in relation to the European tradition from which it is derived. Here there is also importance in Zahavi’s choice to paint in acrylic. Classical still life painting was one of the heights of demonstrating ability in oil painting, the different textures, the reflections in silver ware, the transparency of glass. All of these challenged the painter’s ability. Indeed, even when the kitchens of the humble and the poor were depicted, the painting was rich and addressed a satiated public. The tension between anorexia and bulimia, the satiated delight in representing poverty, was one of the characteristics of the double standard morality of the traditional still life. Reuven Zahavi positions himself in the heart of this conflict, and at the same time he also ridicules it: acrylic, the poor cousin of oil paint would suggest a foretold failure in its dealing with transparency and reflection, although within this a priori limitation Zahavi does wonders, as if nevertheless some wealth sneaks into the heart of poverty. And in fact, about what wealth are we speaking? The remnants of some feast as seen in Ending, After the End or The Field. A meal of the poor? The birthday of the girl in the kindergarten? A sad celebration. Most of the paintings, despite the humour, lightness and the virtuosity, have a layer of melancholy. In The Radish that was Forgotten, a sprouting illustrates that even in old age there is life, though a small life, that comes out of wrinkled skin, rotten flesh and marrow that has lost its juiciness. But this melancholy of the day to day is nothing in comparison to the apocalyptic paintings, paintings of branches, the bottles and the tin cans, remnants left after the fire. Again and again the soot returns, the burning, the physical distortion, horrible feelings that get a moment of grace in modest paintings on paper in diluted watercolour, as delicate and transparent as watercolour. Here there is by now no longer any blossoming and an ironical lowering. In these paintings there is holiness. They are ashes and witnesses. They are relics. The transparent monochrome materiality brings together the sooty body with an absolutely serious, completely beautiful meditative space. On the whole, there is a lot of soot in Zahavi’s paintings and a lot of black: shiny, black formica, a curtain in the background, charcoal, egg plants and Coca Cola. There is black and there is white: the eggs, the plastic utensils, the paper serviettes, the mayonnaise that She Spreads. The drapery and the background usually tend towards the monochromatic but here and there, there is a flash of artificial colour. The still life piles seem to be memorial sites, for a pile of magical objects or a type of improvised gravestone for lives that were, for the body of the eggplant that was perfect till She Cut It, to the spiral biscuit that broke and had her insides exposed in The Notebook. These are descriptions of a fading, and a eulogy to something that was, something stained by misery and ridicule, yet is the descendant of a magnificent dynasty, just as the spiral pastry is the descendant of the Nautilus conch in Dutch still life. The Notebook is an interesting painting. In it there is the broken pastry, and to its right a notebook filled with cramped writing and beside it a cheap Bic pen, whose tip protrudes beyond the edge of the chipboard. This is a narrative painting – a picture within a story, an action that that was stopped in the middle, and one does not know what happened before and what will happen next. Is the secret in the notebook: in words, in thoughts (a part has been erased and part is illegible)? And perhaps the secret is in the industrial biscuit that has been turned from a generic form to a private case, to a broken object that does not arouse any appetite. (Again we are with bulimia that has turned into anorexia). Or perhaps the secret is in the pen which previously spoke and is now silent, hanging on the edge of the abyss? Precisely from within the everyday scene of a to-do list emerges a mysterious riddle, as if the painting is describing a model for the mind, with a broken body and thoughts which are impossible to decipher. The painting challenges the boundaries of representation. Actually, just as the name Freedom Eggs? She asked, the question goes beyond the boundary of the painting so also in The Notebook, the written page is a kind of painting within a painting, an apparently realistic description of illegible thought. In the painting She Immediately Understood, there are pieces of broken charcoal near earphones and a microphone. What happened here? What did she understand? Panic seeps into routine. The Coffee Spilled, an ordinary disaster that turns into an abstract stain on the floor of the studio. The “Uncanny” is revealed in the heart of familiar domesticity. In the last decade Reuven Zahavi has turned to many great genres from the history of art: the series of paintings on the Supreme Court took inspiration from the painting tradition of landscape and monumental buildings. In the paintings of the Haggadah of Pesach, he is in the tradition of history and mythology painting. In the series of figures visiting an exhibition he combines realistic painting with other modernist styles, and in the still life paintings he takes from the height of seventeenth century Holland, Spain and France. All these sources feed into Israeli secularism, impose an ethical-political stand, and contribute to intimacy in the meeting of male and female, rich and poor, the one who survives and the one who perishes. ,