Knox Martin Review (July 26, 1984)

The art (paintings and drawings) of Ilana Raviv has the kind of perceptive rightness as its base as do a certain period of Jackson Pollock, Hals and Miro. When one says a certain period, one indicates a non-analytical flow that congeals the right moment out of a fragile flight, which peaks.

To stop a moment before or after would render the creation average for that artist. When that peak is stopped at, the work has a tension as a crest that is the wild. This has the quality of being in a plane and encountering a solitary barren flower. All is without effect then the suddenness. Now this is esoteric because it can’t be willed. This has been characteristic of Raviv’s earlier work, a less self-conscious work. Given a foot up is then not the garden glimpsed and the awareness of the possibility of carrying an endowment to it’s dangerous potential. Why not eat of the fruit of knowledge so that one can know enough to know, to cast aside the known in order for creation to take place. The vital check is the elements that make up the garden – Raviv is now in the garden. The garden of art consists of only the salient in art as has been pruned and selected by the garden masters. One of these masters’s is C?zanne – C?zanne knowing what the garden is creates it. A painter like Monet illustrates it. Like Turner, Monet is looking at a very stubborn illusion perpetrated because it is energized by the inability to inspect the garden much less create the garden. One is revelation the other is the illustration of a revelation. Dangerous because the risks are everywhere. Beauty is the encounter with the unknown but once having found the unknown to carry it with you makes it the known. It becomes a fossil sample. All these finds must be dropped, any accretion nullify the special access to creation. Ilana Raviv works in this garden her oeuvre is manifestly the evidence of the encounter.

Knox Martin
Professor of Art
Formerly at Yale University
Art Department

Mrs. Ilana Raviv – artist, mother, wife, citizen of the world. She, from the sense of woman perceives the real relationship to art, by knowing what it is. Beyond shibboleth, fashion and encroachment of bourgeoisie surround (art boutique). All that is glib.
This distinguished artist is then open to the dance of intelligence that comes out of the work itself, therefore is self evident and very clear that the work does not come out of any kind of lack, but from a cup that runnith over filled by art from the source which is art in relationship to life and death as mother, daughter, wife, teacher, the dynamics of living to points of joy in revelation and celebration is her art.

Knox Martin
Professor of Art
Formerly at Yale University
Art Department