There is a quiet power in Meir Appelfeld’s paintings; they don’t shout for attention. Instead, they invite a slow, contemplative gaze. In On the Threshold, his current exhibition at the Rothschild Fine Art Gallery, this invitation is extended with particular grace. His works possess an inner luminosity, a sense of something felt as much as seen, drawing us into a space “between the sunsets,” where memory and imagination intertwine.
The viewer enters a zone of quiet tension, a liminal space where the visible and elusive, the momentary and the eternal, converge in poised dialogue. These paintings don’t merely depict objects or places; they meditate on presence, absence, and the trembling stillness in between.
Appelfeld’s still lifes, interiors, florals, and landscapes unfold with the restraint of classical form and the undercurrent of something less tangible: an interior vision shaped as much by memory and reflection as by observation. What they offer is a visual grammar of things that resist resolution, light held in suspension, silence turned outward.
Appelfeld’s creative career
The son of the late writer Aharon Appelfeld, he grew up in a home steeped in literature, art, and philosophical inquiry. “Like every child,” he has said, “you either rebel against what your parents do or grow into it. But you absorb things without even knowing. They rise up in you later.” His medium may differ, but his work shares the same reverence for language, memory, and the structures of the imagination.
A graduate of the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Royal Academy in London (1988-1994), Appelfeld describes his professional life as unfolding along three interwoven paths: painting, teaching, and art historical research. It’s this triad that gives his work its depth, a balance between practice, pedagogy, and critical inquiry.
For nearly three decades, he has taught at Emunah College and other Jerusalem institutions, a role he sees as inseparable from his artistic life. “Meeting adults who want to learn to paint taught me, retrospectively, how much learning is a joint and ongoing enterprise of both teacher and student,” he reflects. Within the confines of his studio, the impulse to instruct and the need to discover coexist.
That same dynamic shapes his scholarly work. At Ben-Gurion University, his doctoral research focused on the 17th-century painter Nicolas Poussin and the intricate relationship between theory and practice. How to balance form and feeling, control and intuition, observation and invention, are threads running through all of Appelfeld’s pursuits.
Between the sunsets
On the Threshold takes its name from what he calls a “between the sunsets,” a phrase drawn from Jewish tradition that becomes a metaphor for artistic liminality. “It’s the space between nature and imagination,” he explains, “between drawing and painting, between art and craft, between emotion and rule, where rule doesn’t mean restriction, but agreement, a kind of shared understanding.”
“Painting is not about the ephemeral,” he insists, “not about the fleeting impulse or the effect of light. It is about the eternal.” His compositions are thus slow, deliberate acts of looking. Light and form, in these works, are not transient effects but stable presences, charged with the weight of thought and care.
The still lifes in the exhibition embody this ethos: an arrangement of objects becomes a meditation on interior silence. His interiors resist narrative, focusing instead on atmosphere and resonance. “My work explores different ways of creating,” he says, “from direct observation to preparatory drawing, from nature or the imagination.” Each method, inevitably, leaves its trace.
His landscapes, though grounded in nature’s abundance, are filtered through a deeply internal lens. Even his floral works, seemingly conventional in subject, function as meditations on the relationship between what is seen and what is sensed.
“The relationship between drawing and painting,” he notes, “embodies the relationship between silence and verbal allusion, between spiritual and physical, between intuition and deliberation.”
The exhibition is on view at the Rothschild Fine Art Gallery, 2 Maor Moshe Street, Tel Aviv, through May 24.