We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.
(Attributed to Samuel Johnson in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson)

This exhibition, centering on the finalists of the Adi Competition for Jewish Expression in Art and Design (2003), examines the concept of light and its various representations in art and design. The works participating in the show deal, each in its own way, with light as an essence - not only as the illumination of an object or a landscape, but as an independent entity possessing symbolic, emotional, and spiritual qualities. Some of the artists use light as a "material," integrating it within their work; others represent light through painting or sculpture; and yet others do so through the medium of photography - a word that literally means "writing in light."

The works by Moshe Gershuni, Mosh Kashi, Masha Yozefpolsky, and Mordecai Ardon address light as an essence emerging out of darkness, the embodiment of the sublime, sometimes also dealing with light and darkness as commingled elements, representing a stage of existence prior to the disentanglement of these opposites. In Ido Bar-El's works light is a material that is freely and spontaneously spattered over the painting surface, somewhat like a volcanic eruption. Micha Ullman's Week, made of sand on paper, has seven layers. With each subsequent layer the sand (in Hebrew hol, which also means "profane" as opposed to "sacred") becomes less dense, clearing space for the whiteness of the paper to emerge, as if simulating the passage from the days of the week to the Sabbath - from the profane to the sacred. Zuzanna JaninA, Belu-Simion Fainaru, and Itzhak Frenkel (Frenel) explore the theme of light emanating from a synagogue, the place of prayer and communion between human beings and God. JaninA suffused a nineteenth-century building in Trnava, Slovakia (a one-time synagogue, later converted to a Jewish museum) with a smoky vapor, creating a fog-like effect. In stills from her videotaped film of the work, the building itself and the ritual artifacts displayed in it are almost submerged in a pool of light. In Fainaru's work, light emanates from a model of a synagogue devoid of any aperture except for slits in the form of Hebrew letters, which, according to the ancient Kabbalistic treatise Sefer Yetzira (The Book of Creation), were the basic elements of Creation. Itzhak Frenkel painted the Safed synagogue in the 1930s - a dark space in which light seems to emerge from the walls of the structure, illuminating the room with a majestic luster.

Other works in the exhibition hint at Jewish traditions and at Biblical accounts: in Sketch for a Garment of Light, Gali Cnaani and Ada Vardi give visual expression to the tradition according to which the leather garments that God gave Adam and Eve after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden were in fact garments of light (in Hebrew, the words for "light" and for "skin," or "leather," are near-homonyms - both words, though spelled differently, are pronounced "or"). The work expresses the tension and interconnection between the spiritual light and the corporeal skin. Einat Arif and Yossi Galanti's photographic triptych Medium features a rainbow created by the refraction of the sun's rays - a symbol of the divine promise and the covenant between man and God. Muli Ben- Sasson's sculpture Golel Or (Who Rolls Away the Light, a phrase taken from the Jewish evening prayer) represents twilight, that hour of the day when light and darkness merge: the light plays on a revolving iron Moebius strip (an Escher-like loop with half a twist in its middle, so that the division between its inner and outer sides is obliterated), creating reflections in which light and matter alternately unite and part.

In the world of the Midrash and the Kabbalah, the candle bears symbolic significance. In the Kabbalah it represents the connection between the material and the celestial world: the lower part of the flame, where the fire is blue-red, symbolizes the realm of the material, while its upper, white part is associated with the spiritual and the divine. Ruti Nemet's photographic work, featuring a candle, citrons, and a knife, draws a connection between images from the Jewish world (citrons) and the still-life paintings of the seventeenth century - the vanitas paintings, also called memento mori (literally, "remember that you will die") - in which the candle represents the ephemeral quality of life. In Dov Abramson's Ner Mitzvah (Commandment Candle), memorial candles, each representing a different Jewish commandment, are arranged and catalogued as if they were raw materials. The mapping of the commandments and their notation in a graphic, dispassionate manner brings to mind, in the artist's view, questions about the classification and mapping of the mitzvoth - the material expression of religious life.

Zelig Segal, born 1933 Let There Be Light, 2003 Aluminum, 9x26x23 cm Collection of the artist Winning artwork of the Adi Competition for Jewish Expression in Art and Design

In works from the late 1970s, Avraham Ofek used mirror reflections to create words made of light, which he projected onto walls and stones: letters, injunctions, and statements forming a kind of divine writing -writing in light. Words and light are also connected in Gary Goldstein's work - a series of postcards painted in black, on which the artist wrote, in white, verses from Genesis and from Kabbalistic treatises dealing with the concept of light. Belu-Simion Fainaru reproduced the Hebrew word tzimtzum (meaning "reduction" or "withdrawal") in narrow neon letters, thereby expropriating the word, which is related to Kabbalistic traditions, from its original context and transporting it to the domain of technological, industrial, human-made light.

In the work of the artists from the group The Light is Good (Yehuda Goldin, Philippe Scheimann, Michael Kokolevich, Adina Shpigler, and Malki Firer), light is identified with divine as well as human benevolence. The group illuminated dark places in poorer neighborhoods and sites throughout Israel, exploring the influence of light as a dynamic means of bringing people together. The works of Leora Laor, Hanna Sahar, and Dorit Yacobi express in different ways the experience of the individual facing the light - light that creates a sense of revelation, of a merging of the individual with nature, and of spiritual elevation. Eran Erlich tackles the image of the angel, which is said to be made of light, in his Angels' Blood, a figure made out of capillaries engraved on transparent Perspex. The capillaries cannot be seen without light; they come to life when the material is illuminated. A striking representation of the connection between light and life appears in Abel Pann's lithograph " . . . and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life . . . " (1923), in which the creation of man is described in the image of a strong ray of light shining on his face.

Light as an expression of the sublime in nature is represented in the works of Ann Ginsburgh Hofkin and Dalia Amotz in photography and Boris Lecker in painting. In these artists' works, the light, while acting on the landscape, is also an element existing in its own right: in Dalia Amotz's work, light becomes an almost impenetrable veil; in Ginsburgh Hofkin's landscape photograph, light engulfs the sky in a sea of white; and in Boris Lecker's work, light seems to rise from the depths of the canvas, emanating from beneath the painted landscape. This is also the context for the work of American artist Ralph Blakelock, active during the second half of the nineteenth century. In his paintings Blakelock explored light in the American wilderness at sunrise and sunset. He followed, in his own way, the path of the Luminists - a group of American artists

Ada Vardi, born 1969, Gali Cnaani, born 1968 Sketch for a Garment of Light, 2003 Cotton and copper threads, 62x40 cm each Collection of the artists From the Adi Competition for Jewish Expression in Art and