"The cactus: Introspection" opening reception: August 19, 2004 Curator: Aya Lurie Press release" Since 2001, the cactus plant has occupied a central place in llan Baruch's painting. The attraction to and the deep identification with the subject of his painting which he developed in the course of working led to intensive painterly investigation alongside personal expression of feeling. The paintings in the exhibition unite into a kind of wide ranging series which delineates a journey of searchings in the shift from the descriptive-mimetic, faithful to the exterior, to the phase of introspection present in the image reaching toward abstraction. The fleshy, prickly cactus plant, locally known as the sabra, whose origin is in South America, became a local archetypal representative charged politically, socially and culturally, a distinctive symbol of the country and its people in the paintings of Reuven Rubin, Nahum Gutman, Asim Abu-Shakra, and others. The mythological affinity of the cactus in Ilan Baruch's work is assimilated in another type of existential struggle - that of a personal psychic revelation.