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Aya Ben Ron Clastic

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Written by Charles Campbell

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Even the most casual glance at Aya Ben Ron’s recent project, Clastic, sets into motion the mechanisms of fascination and horror that pulls viewers into its beautiful, complex and contradictory surface. They are works of pattern and detail with an intensity that defies their cold computer rendering of line and colour. Unflinching in their examination of malformation and medical intervention, the work exists at the point where beauty and trauma meet.

Clastic is a flower in a petri dish, a flower whose intricately layered petals are made out of medical images of dissection and disease. It is their fragile and delicate structure that seduces our eye into looking, their saturated colours and repeated radial symmetry that pulls it towards images it rather would not see. An amputation or a diseased orifice, flesh being pulled back, an eye precisely pierced with a slender implement. The dichotomy set off by the work quickly emerges, clinical vs. beautiful, content vs. form, surgical implements vs. flowers, and it is through this dichotomy that one can easily enter the work. It is also to this dichotomy which reason appeals as an anaesthetic to an operation to which we have already surrendered.

The images in Clastic are taken from medical textbooks, digitally redrawn on the computer as line-art images, manipulated and then printed on photographic paper. The final image is formed by cutting a series of these prints by hand and re-assembling them in layers.

This type of pictorial presentation of scientific medical imagery relates directly to the 16th century 'Fugitive Sheets' which formed Clastic's original reference. There the sum of then current medical and scientific knowledge was presented didactically though 'The Four Seasons', an illustrated allegory of the cycle of life where fold back layers of paper allowed the viewer/reader to penetrate ever deeper into the illustrated bodies and reveal the underlying mechanisms of life and science. Knowledge was made palatable to an audience whose context of beliefs and superstitions necessitated its containment in a pictorial, allegorical and symbolic system that deferred to that context.

So it would seem that Clastic's decorative presentation of trauma and disease offers similarly to make unpalatable notions digestible. The disturbing representations of human malady and intrusive remedy are subsumed into a pictorial whole, turning malady into motif. Yet it is precisely this turn which produces in the work an affect beyond the disgust and horror which the text book images induce. Beyond the kaleidoscopic colours and patterns there is a sense of beauty stirred by the evocation of and pain. A beauty that itself sits on the edge of trauma. Ultimately it is not a question of whether beauty hides or reveals, but what is revealed about beauty, that is its uncomfortable proximity to pain.