Hilit Blum

 

Domenico Veneziano's John the Baptist; a donkey chewing happily on a hay cart; Vittore Carpaccio's gondoliers; a poodle; a square, hairy-winged angel; a woman on a cellphone; an airplane called A4; a Lithuanian stone-paved alley; the night sky: These are just a few of the images populating the sweeping vista of Leo Ray's Infinite Painting.

 

Leo Ray, Plane A4, from Infinite Painting

 

Infinite Painting, as indicated by its name, is a work in progress, from which this exhibition shows approximately a hundred canvases. The paintings create sequences, mostly horizontal, one vertical, like a motion-picture’s celluloid film, spread open into stills. Towards Infinity is an autobiographical dream of sorts, as well as a dream about the history of painting. In its playful and imaginative way, the sequence is a descendant of Gustave Courbet's 1855 The Painter's Studio, in which the artist summons to the space around his easel, and hence into his painting, all the people who influenced his life and work.

 

Gustave Courbet, The Painter's Studio, 1855

 

"I wanted to have a diary without writing one," says Leo Ray, "so I attached canvases to one another and they began expanding sideways and up. I look at Infinity not as a series, but as one growing painting or a kind of public-access diary, with the usual things one puts in a diary: What happened to me, what I like, what I saw, how I felt. That's what I paint." According to Ray's own list the painting contains: "Portraits of real people, portraits of imaginary people, quotes from paintings I like (but why not paintings I really love?), memories, dreams, landscapes I’ve seen or imagined, dogs, cats, airplanes, trees, shrubs and grass, water, horses, flowers, birds, sunset reflections, color stains and spots (these are especially important), texts I copied from my old notebook, the night sky and all kinds of other things." Towards Infinity maintains a democracy of images. A sleeping soldier quoted from Giotto is equal in his compositional status to a painted airplane as well as to an abstract stain. And, as in Courbet's allegory, Infinity’s figures do not make eye contact with each other, but populate their space independently and separately. The relationship between them is not personal or emotional (aside from quotes of paintings which include several figures), but graphic, rhythmic and conceptual. We experience them as characters in a dream, as Egyptian icons signifying something beyond themselves, or as fleeting faces in the windows of a passing train. At times, and the more we retreat from the canvas, we might sense them in even more abstract ways, as notes and chords scattered on a stave, or like birds gathered in different arrays on electric wires. Even Ray's basic human figure, "The Passerby", the painter’s Everyman and subject of many of his drawing series, is rectangular and elongated.

 

Leo Ray, Passersby, 2008, ink, acrylic and gouache on paper, 70x100cm.

The Passerby, a human or animal figure drawn as a caricature, sometimes in Expressionist style, represents a state of mental nomadism. It signals a steadfast refusal to settle in a landscape or indoors, in a historical period or even in an exclusive artistic style. In Towards Infinity Ray has fully fleshed The Passerby’s native habitat. Ray’s quotes from art history and improvisations on them include fragments from the works of Simone Martini, Vittore Carpaccio, Guido Reni, the Flemish painter Jan Massijs and the German artist Hans Maler, Piero della Francesca, Domenico Veneziano, Correggio and others. For Ray, this is a paying of dues to the painters with whom he shares his life. Towards Infinity quotes landscapes and figures – notably, background figures – from their paintings and interlaces them in its daily views, dream visions and memories. The art of painting and the history of painting are experienced here as a deep current running through the artist's biography.

"Stripes with Plaid"

In Towards Infinity Leo Ray initiates viewers into a mental freedom rarely witnessed in the history of painting. The work is a bold collage of genres and contents derived from the entire tradition of painting. It contains figurative, expressionist, surrealist, cubist (mostly flattened), abstract and naïve painting, as well as art brut and copies of photographs. Asked if he was not afraid of thematic eclecticism, Ray replies: "Einstein said that once you accept the universe as matter expanding into a nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. I'm not afraid of freedom. After all, I'm pretty limited in what I can do. The relevant question is: To what should I aspire? I believe that every good painting has something metaphysical in it. I believe that there is an ideal arrangement of colors, that an ideal arrangement of shapes does exist. There is a god of the painting. Something Platonic." This declaration warns us, perhaps, against using the term postmodern too freely in relation to this work. Though giving Corregio’s Aphrodite a cylindrical head is undoubtedly a carefree post-modern act, believing that there is a platonic ideal to be reached is (perhaps) not. What, therefore, is the god in the work before us? What is its fundamental principal? The simple, immediate answer must be rhythm. If Hieronymus Bosch "translates" fantastic content to a figurative style, Leo Ray translates the fantastical stylistic combinations naturally created in his mind by the language and history of painting, sifted through imagination, to a traceable and abstract pictorial rhythm. The rhythm determines the success of any given sequence and of the piece as a whole. Indeed, it is Ray’s deep faith in rhythm as a unifying force which empowers him to lay out a world of realized fantasies, in generic mixtures as well as contents. Despite its extreme, circus-like generic freedom, rhythm-and-composition-wise, Towards Infinity is a painting of classic modernist artistic values and aspirations. One can easily see how naturally Infinity arises from a flattened cubist painting such as 1920 Paul Klee's Templegärten – a gouache landscape divided on paper into three unequal rectangles.

Paul Klee, Templegärten, 1920

 

Klee repeatedly disrupts the visual contiguity between his rectangles (i.e. “this is a tower”) in favor of a tightly woven rhythmic continuity, in which rectangular, triangular and softened trapezoid patches interweave in blue, orange, red and gray. The gaps between the rectangles function as breaths and as temporal or spatial displacements of the visual narrative, a technique Ray also draws on. Ray's painting, regardless of size, reveals a very similar classical-modernist need for a unified rhythm, as well as for disrupted kinds of visual continuity: Correggio's Aphrodite receives a  loosely figurative body while her expressionist head takes the form of a flat cylinder; a stone wall in a Vilnius alley turns into a pink abstract surface; a yellow figurative chair borrowed from a Carpaccio painting translates, across the gap between canvases, to the edge of a blue chair, set with a bottle in an expressionist room. Indeed using the edges of the canvases knowingly is one important technique by which Ray creates, and attracts attention to, disruption. It is often difficult to discern, in any sequence of Towards Infinity, when one canvas ends and another begins. This sort of confusion is used by the painter to develop a rhythm which is not indifferent to the canvas's boundaries, but makes use of them as wellsprings of rhythmic energy. Oftentimes, the painter pushes the intersection of one narrative sequence and the next some way beyond the gap between two canvases. The renewed sequence then becomes – to that gap – a syncope to a beat.

 

Leo Ray, Bird and Brick Wall, from Infinite Painting.

 

"Blame it on the Boogie"

The desire to paint large narratives was born, presumably, with the first wall, and was always subject to architectonic constraints. If we were to build a place that would perfectly house Infinite Painting, we would have to build it along with the painting, as a growing, open structure, not unlike the virtual space of a blog. In aspiration, Infinity seeks to eliminate format by opening one, two or even three (when the paintings expands vertically) sides of the painting's rectangle. Establishing the pictorial space as a work in progress gives the viewer with an unusually dynamic role. Towards Infinity hints at our physical reality: We humans are surrounded by an infinity of time and space. All our activities take place in an open-format atmosphere. We mostly choose to ignore this openness because we cannot come to grips with it. We cannot grasp infinity empirically although we are born and die into it; although, in terms of artistic work, it is our first context and our last. Still, we do have the ability to contain touches of infinity in our lives and see moments as eternity. This is what Leo Ray – a physicist by education – does by suddenly separating two parts of a narrative sequence with a graphic sign or with an abstract shape: As when, for example, he separates a Renaissance scene from a modern city street with a gray, clipped, sharp-angled triangle, and with a flat blue clipped rectangle (to the right of the nobleman, below); or by sectioning views and interlacing them (below).

 

Leo Ray, Cats in an Abandoned House, from Infinite Painting

 

These interrupting shapes are like a breath within a breath, a long metaphysical breath within a short physical one. The abstract shapes, as well as the color stains, break off the local pictorial narrative in favor of rhythmic spacing and the general continuity of the painting, thus freeing the eye to savor the painting's new and renewing rhythms.

R&B

Towards Infinity is a voyage in blue, sometimes into blue. Traditionally, blue signifies a mental spectrum ranging from deep peacefulness to melancholy and even depression, or what Kandinsky named "inhumane chagrin"; from a deep commitment to the viewed object (even unto a state of hypnosis, or religious devotion), to a rejection of it as unrelated to human affairs. The triangular sky plane, painted on twenty canvases, is a homage to the great altarpieces of European Christian painting, reminiscences of which peek at us from various sections of Towards Infinity. It also reveals celestial blue and the great blackness behind it as the mental and spiritual backdrop of the painting as a whole (note the sliver of black background peeping from behind the blue rectangle in the sequence shown above). Infinity, it seems, invites us to view it as one views the sky, slowly or searchingly, or else glimpsingly, to check for current weather, or even aimlessly, with clouds, electric wires, birds and airplanes drifting into our line of sight and disappearing. The sheer breadth of the piece makes us walk alongside it as we walk in nature. Its rhythms enable us to build up a type of repeated or concentrated observation, usually associated with the natural world.

Infinity in a Nutshell or How to look at it?

One important question raised by Infinite Painting is therefore: How does the opening of the rectangular canvas edge affect the language of painting and its functioning as a system? Furthermore, how does it affect the viewer’s choices? At each moment, Infinite Painting posits competing, intertwined demands on our attention: Should we follow the narrative or the abstract rhythm of the piece? Should we choose "words", "sentences" or "paragraphs"? How much can we take in at once? If, for example, we focus on the five panels to the left of the Cities sequence (below), we may notice that the angel's body with its flattened head responds to the painting's format and becomes rectangular, in order to parallel the upper and lower boundaries of the painting. So do the cloud on the right hand side, and the deep blue and orange stains, which seem to be casting the angel's shade on the left. All of these are “pressed down” by the canvas to become rectangular (an essentially modernist object-to-format response).

 

Leo Ray, Klaipeda and Venice, from Infinite Painting

 

The angel's wing functions as the left hand edge of an isosceles (a classical compositional shape), with its apex on the roof to the angel's right (just out of sight and above the canvas) and its right hand edge stretching between the German rooftop and the inside of the black coat. This structure lends the sequence a classical, harmonic character. Other triangles are implied around the central one: The oar in the gondolier's hand and the slanted reddish Sienese wall (a quotation from Ambrogio Lorenzetti) parallel the angel's wing and function as the edges of expanding triangles. The triangle's right hand edge corresponds to the slope of the black coat flying in the wind, and so on and so forth, so that, as we back away from the canvas, we feel the shapes both multiplying and broadening, along with the rhythm. In this contest over the viewer’s attention, the large colored surfaces also imply larger shapes than can be contained by the actual canvas: The blue patches on the left come together to create a free-form stain which is the beginning of a right-angled triangle (from the central perpendicular to the left). The free black triangle presses waves of straight geometrical shapes against the black block ahead of it: The scaled black stain on the angel's right, the pants, the black coat and the graying hair, and then again, on the pants worn by the figure on the extreme right (this is a kind of Morse code segment: stain-line-stain-line). Note how the right hand side of the fragment, where the black is predominant, also has a blue upside down triangle of sky and jeans. Infinite Painting is therefore a crossroads overflowing with suggested views: Should we focus on the little triangles, such as the white-blue-black one formed by the angel and the darkness into which he walks? Or should we take a step back and see the implied larger triangles, like the one created between the slant of the quay and the yellow banister, or between the banister and the end of the upside-down crimson triangle? Or, from still further back, should we give ourselves over to the rhythm of the piece and see only diagonals, perpendiculars and stains, the narrative stripped down to abstract form? Naturally, the more we retreat from the elongating canvas, the better we grasp the scope of the work, and the more we can sense its rhythm in its entirety. This rhythm is no less than a handwriting that rises above and beyond the story it tells. Leo Ray studied painting and calligraphy at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. He stresses the important role calligraphy plays in his art as a theory of composition. Ray says he acquired the fundamentals of paintings from calligraphy more than he did from his theoretical and practical painting and drawing classes, since calligraphy emphasizes what he considers to be the  cornerstones of painting; rhythm, repetition and variation of symbols, the relation of an object to an empty space, and the importance of the empty space per se. Calligraphy is also central questions of material and execution, principally the creation of a unique “handwriting”, or brushwork, the freshness and vigor of the brush touching the canvas, and the  vitality of the painted sign. From this perspective, Infinite Painting appears to be an extensive experiment in pictorial calligraphy. The further we retreat from the painting, the more condensed becomes the rhythm we perceive in color and symbol. "Condensed" may sound paradoxical in the context of a work that aspires to infinity. Nonetheless, density is a deep value of the work before us. It relates equally to “quiet” sequences and to sequences that are packed with information. Infinity may be a memoir of an entire life, but this does not mean that its materials are not carefully chosen. The arrangement of materials, whether many or few, in the most rhythmic, crystallized way possible, while using the largest possible diversity of basic shapes, is the painting's touchstone.

 

Leo Ray, Horse on a Bridge, from Infinite Painting

 

Perhaps this is the best way to describe how the artist, and perhaps humans in general, respond to the pressure of infinity: With a burst of abundance on the one hand, and with the most condensed expression we can find on the other, as a crystallized counter-force to the unending space that surrounds us.

 

 

 

Dr. Ketzia Alon

Leo Ray's new paintings are large-scale, impressive, absorbing, yet nonetheless—soft and delicate, as though pervaded by an enchanting dreamlike atmosphere. They create a panoramic landscape that seeks to draw its viewers into itself, but the landscape then dissolves into foggy mysticism - see the work "Balcony," for example.

Ray's paintings move along the axis of tension between movement in the direction of stabilizing an internal architecture to the painting and the burning desire to unravel the composition, a desire coarsely formalized through the way in which many of the paintings come unraveled at the edges, as it were, and "pour" into abstract painting, into the solitary line, into an agitated flurry of drawing, into a clean, demarcated patch of color, or into an unseen end. See the painting "River," for example.

Ray's paintings, punctuated with large swaths of dense visual information, are seemingly intent on creating a hermetic space of their own, a boundless plane in which the icons are immersed and in which a one-of-its-kind event takes place, a happening that could be framed under the narrative of "Contention and Conservation."

The contention is the postmodernist contention with the past, with the clichés of painting, with familiar quotations from the history of art; and out of that, willy-nilly, conservation is accomplished. The painterly composition replete with transcendent totality can also be read as fluid material that enables fixing and safeguarding, the canvas as a trap which can capture the chaotic permutation at a crucial moment, mark the interference between the thing and color, form, line, medium.

Ray's paintings convey the pure feeling of a breeze come from chaos, a breeze which has been captured, domesticated, and formalized into excellent art.

Gil Goldfine

Moving on to an adjoining gallery one is hit by a captivating range of raucously colored and amusingly drawn paintings by Leo Ray (b. Vilnius, 1950), based on a recurring group of cartoon-like actors, mostly human and feline with the occasional bird, horse and dog tagging along. Ray pulls out all the spectral stops by combining shapes, lines, dots and dashes in unadulterated violets with Kelly green, a bright yolk with flaming magenta and orange backgrounds with electric blue rectangles.

More than being an uninhibited colorist, Ray is an anecdotal painter. Each traditional canvas or larger work assembled from several different size rectangles into a domino-like composition, relates to the human condition as described in fantastic episodes. Domestic encounters, grotesque dreams and perverted events are expressed  in an illustrative poster-style using heavy black contours for figures and objects alike. His Everyman is like a clown playing the fool but eternally searching for a deeper meaning to his life. And while digging, Ray's lead character gets involved in the most bizarre predicaments one could imagine. Titles such as "The Right Way of Listening to Bird's Songs", "Soap Bubble Hunter", "The Riddle of the Horse Who Wanted to Cross the Bridge" and "Transparent Philosophical Cat"  provide enough fodder for the surreal cannon to blow one's mind.

The most interesting works in the exhibition are the composite pictures in which Ray meshes art historical styles with his own brand of comic drawing. Painted in 2006, each work focuses on a classically rendered female nude in sepia wash grisaille, and is supported by vignettes of explosive abstract expressionist brush marks, flighty calligraphic illustrations and bits and smaller units from his inventive menagerie. These particular works are less colourful than others in the show but are filled with the most harmonious range of disparate elements and textures. Brush and palette knife, transparencies, alla prima, realism and caricature intertwine in a most alluring manner.

Altough Ray's images are fresh and often provocative, their free-wheeling placement on flat planes with no perspective can be associated with the inverted proportions of child's imagination. But his art is much more sophisticated, a clever mixture of Klee, Appel, Rouault and the French poster designer Sauvignac. And what with his poking fun at Velazquez in Artists and Model, 2005, and a combined celebration of Modigliani and Matisse in Reclining Red Nude, 2006, one can add a satirical pinch of irony to Ray's upfront, scrumptious art.

Jerusalem Post, 2006

Moshe Shek

Art is a very narrow bridge to Ayoka* lands.

Painting is an attempt to create an identity card that would serve as an entrance pass to the temporary camp of those who try to understand a source of vitality.

One who confronts a blank page daily, knows that it is impossible to stay emotionaly uninvolved while placing forms and colors according to their priority.

The painter mobilizes his life experience like a basting stitch binding together different layers and twining them in place, in order to report changes within ourselves and within our environment.

A variety of techniques is used with the freshness of someone who has never painted before. Each brush stroke is for the painter like a new backpack adventure. Leo does not decide what's permitted and what's forbidden in his interpretations. Where will the truck take the painting - a dovecot opening where the wings are fluttering, dreams are blowing and cats are frightened; perhaps they are carried there against their will. There is a fine line between the wisdom of the all-knowing commentator and his seriousness in wishing to expand himself, and between the clown who reduces his experiences to a small bubble. The skill required to blow this bubble inspires admiration and awe for the limitless human ability to reduce and condense.

*Ayoka lands – mythological lands. Ayoka: one who causes joy (editor's note)

2006

Efi Gen, curator

For about three years Ray and I were trying to agree on an exhibition. This entailed a number of visits to his studio in the heart of the noisy and sooty industrial area of Tel Aviv, with each visit leaving me with a longing to return for the next.

Ray became known in Israel and in the wider world because of his extraordinarily colorful works. He takes us to a colorful world where fantasy is ruled by a simple childish joy, in which black contours are drawn around figures and objects. Ray has perfected a distinctive and humorous style devoid of coquetry.

We had made a decision to show a series of works which had not been previously exhibited to a wider public and excluded everything with which Ray was associated, even color.

The exhibition consists of "White Landscapes". Thirteen works in oil on white canvas. The background forms a substrate of intensive actions of hiding and revealing, and it is of no less importance than the brush marks and images which it bears.

The works appear to be a break in the years of colorful creation. Most of the works are of the same size and are semi-abstract and sometimes they bear hints of an object, a figure, a story. The white background is different in each work; it is a rich base with a three-dimensional texture. The sensual richness of the background almost invites one to touch, to explore it. The works speak of silence, primeval freshness, space, existence and non-existence, about appearing and disappearing.

The works are based on, and deal with the core of Ray's work - calligraphy, the source of his inspiration. His philosophical attitude to calligraphy as a theory of composition became clear in our talks. He sees calligraphy as a personal art, a discipline which can release one's creativity. It deals with form, tension and relations. It is an art of form and a spiritual journey.

His work is based on preparatory sketches of rhythm and music, of signs and shapes. Music that is devoid of colors or composition of shapes, which, being colorless appears as a feast of color of another kind.

2005

Ariella Amar

Between sooty garages and gray streets of southern Tel Aviv sits painter Leo Ray and creates his worlds. These worlds are colorful, humorous and disturbing at the same time. A Renaissance scribe writing a message ("You Better Send Me SMS"), a frightened cat standing on his hind paws ("Espresso"), a city in blue, a woman on a balcony ("Balcony"), this and that (and this and this)….

Thus is what he named his latest exhibition that will be opened at the end of July at the Hezi Cohen Gallery.

Leo's speech is reserved, and so are the titles of his works. "This and This" is the title of an exhibition of an artist, a painter and calligrapher who uses the language of art, and not words, sentences or stories.

In a conversation we had in his studio, full of painted canvases and a harsh smell of oil paints, he explained the process of his work. "First of all, the format is important. I wanted to paint large canvases".

Having established the size of the canvases (which had to fit through the narrow staircase leading to his studio), he began the process of painting. First he scanned his sketches which were drawn in black ink in his small sketchbook. He followed this by constructing the composition on a computer, like an architect builds a house. He chose his own drawings and quotes from the history of Art, placed them together and added colored stains to create a harmony which has the unity of time and place.

The large dimensions invite the beholder to a journey, but the power which radiates from the canvases originates not from their size but from the exact handling of the paint and placement of shapes and figures. Precision with a great spirit.  Leo Ray applies his colors and shapes without being tempted by the contents or the subject. He is not out to conquer the heart of the beholder. He speaks the language of art (which may seem self-evident), however, unlike the majority of painters, his painting does not begin with a subject which is then translated into visual language.

Leo created his personal and complicated combination of figures, colors, shapes, blobs and lines. This complexity is shown in fascinating colors and in multiple characters, drawn in different styles and joined together by the artist's hand. Surprisingly, the multiplication does not create jitter or discomfort. On the contrary, the variety and the quantity interlace into a balanced composition, which creates a fascinating visual encounter. A kind of collage, a fantastic, associative world in which the eye is attracted to colors, figures and lines. For example, the painting "English Red" is a view through the "windows" which are "torn" in the layers of the rusty-red color. The inspiration for this painting was a rusty and stained sheet-iron gate that caught Leo's eye and heart. The "gate" allows the coexistence of the different worlds and unites them into one, like a building unites many apartments. There is a different world in every apartment, and we, the beholders, are viewing and seeing them. As in life, the simultaneous existence of parallel stories reflect the deep introspection into human mundane and poetic existence; the loneliness, alienation, silence, concentration, a smile, rain and humor.

The "window" of the bright yellow rectangle in the bottom of the painting arrests and leads the eye to the naked woman. Her wilted body droops as she sits immersed in her thoughts and scratches her leg.

 The "window" in the upper corner above her contains a man drawn in lines, who may be absent-minded and may be smiling.  He walks in the direction of a black area, which leads us to the rain, falling onto a house on the left and the black cloud from which rigid diagonal lines are drawn. As in the Jonathan Geffen's story "The Sixteenth Sheep", the green man on the right is from "another story" As it was said, Leo is not interested in the narrative, but in the end, the story emerges and the viewer is invited to devise it…

Erev Rav

Dr. Miriam Or

L'acqua che tocchi dei fiumi è l'ultima di quella che andò e la prima di quella cheviene. Così il tempo presente 

(Leonardo da Vinci)

The water which you touch in the river is the last of that which has already passed and the first of that which is to come; such is the present

(Leonardo da Vinci)

Leo Ray -- Tradition and Innovation

Joy and Sorrow                 

Everything is a gift

Leo Ray's paintings embrace the reminiscences of the History of Art and the impressions of our immediate and contemporary life with humor and love. They are always relevant to our most humble human behavior. Our virtues and vices, affected by modern technologies, still leave us, as always, with a longing to remain human, including the behavior which is determined by the most primitive instincts. The lack of compassion, love and care leave a modern man in a constant state of stress and loneliness, with a continuing, desperate search for protection and most of all – for love. As modern life alienates us from others, the lack of relationships between human beings is replaced by the friendship with dogs and cats. We can notice this in Ray's paintings on several occasions. Besides Dog and Cat, the Bird is another specific symbol which dominates his paintings. Leo sometimes feels that he himself, and also others, are transformed into birds whose voices differ one from another, as well as their behavior. Ray's identification with birds springs from his intention to emphasize the symbolism of the human soul, which acts according to the changing moods and circumstances, as birds do. Contrary to Lafontaine, Krilov and Eliezer Steinberg, Leo Ray translated his own vocabulary into non-written fables and proverbs, arranged and painted in rich and vivid colors and shapes.

The identification with birds varies and transfers to other animals, such as the donkey, the horse, the fish and many others. A good fable is short and concentrated in its message; similarly Leo Ray's paintings are clear and simple. Ray can portray the most terrible and scary situation in a simple and open-minded manner that makes it easily understood to a large number of people. He suggests, but does not criticize.

Leo Ray's manner is gentle and his delicate humor raises a smile on the faces of his viewers. Ray is appreciated and respected by the public who do not feel frustrated but happy to be understood and return this feeling as they look at Leo Ray's paintings. The paintings represent a faithful mirror of people's happiness and failures, misfortunes and successes, pains and joys. Ray's Art is indeed a faithful mirror projecting people's lives, environment, culture and dreams. In this respect his paintings tend to present a key that can open the door of consciousness and awareness and lead the beholder to feelings of happiness.

This key also connects between time and space, it enables one to understand oneself more fully in a mirror of the past, connecting it to the present. Leo Ray recreates examples from classical art as a channel connecting the past, the present and the future. Therefore it is an "Infinity". Leo Ray once said, that an artist is a magician. He can transform the images of the past to something more powerful by placing them in a different context. Personages from historical paintings become heroes performing new roles in a drama of modern life.