Alexandre Benjamin Navet is a French designer and artist. He has done massive works, designed luxury boutiques and worked in the world of fashion. This year he had a solo show at a gallery in Paris. The show was titled “L’Invitation.” All of the works in the show focus on the mundane, everyday ritual of gathering around a table for a meal.
Pictured here is his piece Un Dimanche Anime (“An Animated Sunday”). It consists of wood pieces, some of which are cutout, colored with pastel. The objects in the frame are ordinary, familiar to us, used by us every day. Chairs. Plates. Glasses. Salt and pepper shakers. All set around or upon a table. What makes the scene animated?
Navet invites us to imagine. Who will sit around the table? What are the relationships among them? What conversations might they share? Will memories dominate? Or will hopes for the future?
We realize: It is not the canvass by itself. It is our imagining about the canvass that animates what is before us. Navet’s table is a site of revelation and transformation. It is where the tangible and the imagined meet. The ordinary becomes astounding. The fixed becomes dynamic. The mundane becomes meaningful. We discover that we have the power to make the world seem newly fashioned…again.
We open a page of Torah. Black letters creating familiar words on a field of white. Combined, they form stories we have met before. Navet whispers: “Imagine what else. Let the familiar become strange. Discover something new, not just about the words but about yourself.”
Now, the tame becomes wild. The static, dynamic. The coolness of settled certainty combusts into flames. The fire of black lettered words and the fire of the spaces in between and around them. A conflagration of possibilities. We are making the world anew…again.
All of this happens around a table of a fellowship of curiosity, compassion and imagination. And when we push back our chairs to leave, neither we nor the world are the same.
Torah study will resume in August.
With love,
Rabbi Moskowitz
Un Dimanche Anime by Alexandre Benjamin Navet
