Nandala

The Mandala of the Divine Feminine

The Mandala of the Divine Feminine

Arye J. Leib

A review of Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi Artwork

1

There is something so magical in those Mandalas, a true innovation. For Judaism there is something so revolutionary here that it is un-graspable. But maybe it brings us back to a different kind of Judaism archetypal, mythological.

I feel that those Mandalas are the pure essence of what you were trying to teach and to experience, represented in a direct visual way. You have created worship or a shrine for the woman, for sex, geometry that is sacred eroticism.

This woman that you take a part and re-compose again and again in all kinds of shapes and combinations is ‘The Woman’, the effeminate essence herself, stripped from adornments or even from personality. She is very sexual and yet she is completely an abstract, some kind of a threshold, a gate between the sensual and the metaphysic. She is likely to arouse desire but then immediately she disillusions it and makes it into a form of wonder and diving into unknown depth, a gate to an altered-reality.

2

A classic mandala is a harmonious representation of the cosmos and in your artwork – the woman is the cosmos. Her organs weaving reality in a hypnotizing sensual interlacement. Seemingly, she is Maya – a mere hide and seeks game of reflections, but without her, there is neither a universe nor life at all.

In the same way that it is a symbolic representation the mandala is also an electrifying temptation that draws you in with great passion, almost a devouring one.

Its organs are weaving together a complicated flower, maybe it’s the life flower of sacred geometry, maybe or maybe tender pussy leaflets. Here, every organ or body part, have life of its own, a testimony to such a penetrating passion that experiences an entire world in every touch and in every observation.

3

Every mandala is a delicate balance between opposites. It creates a living organism, a supreme pattern of one holographic soul that manifests fully in each of its organs.  It is a worm’s hole between dimensions as well, an exercise of meditating the infinite that nests in each individual body part. Our dichotomist world, lewd, monkey-minded, is being redeemed by the perfect symmetry, the mathematical one, that draws us back to the archaic unity of the Creators mind.

And in your artwork a particular body part, whether it’s a hand, a leg, a breast or a nipple, is being duplicated to all directions creating a magnificent fractal. It loses its identity while the physical is turning to a supreme Idea.  It doesn’t make it lose its sensuality, to the contrariety – it empowers sensuality to the point of utter yearning. It seems like there – between the woman’s curves an infinite pleasure is being promised, redemption, a re-birth. And in the meanwhile you go through some kind of alchemical melting. Everything becomes focused to one point – the center of it all. And it lies there – between her thighs, in the texture of her skin, in the tender design of each dent and curve, but it resonates in your own heart as well. When you feel it outside of you in such great intensity you are waking up to experience it within you as well.

4

It is the ‘Woman’ that is wide opening to you through these mandalas, but it is also the goddess within her, beyond her. It is also the ultimate One, the abstract that cannot be spoken but can be experienced with a wondering heart and elated astonishment. This woman invites you to be – to be whatever you would have wished to be. However – maybe it is just enough that for the first time you are really alive, really fully present. Instantaneously she, which had seduced you to merge with her by her intoxicating clasp, to be devoured by her, brings you back to yourself. This cosmic woman, that had been out-there all of a sadden is resonating within you as your own flesh and blood.

5

My friend – I have no idea how you have made it, but you did it in the most awe inspiring way. I have a feeling that your mandalas will spread in the world and will make an indelible impression on the collective sub-consciousness. Observation creates reality, and your particular observation of the Woman, of passion, of the mysteries of sex and love, will well serve the new eroticism that the world is so thirsty of: sex that is a ritual for life and love, in which the physical is the metaphysical and there is no gap between them.

Nandala

Sacred Photography

Sacred Photography

Eyal Ben Dov *

A review of the art work of Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi

“While I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.” ( Ezekiel 1)

In exile we sit and already are waiting, and here these photos are coming opening the skies to vision divine images. Photo-art mandalas that describe supreme heavens, shapes and forms of spiritual architecture, of angels in infinite geometric transformation. In an electronic computerized loop, leading us to the spirituality of the 21^st century.

“The Animals sped back and forth like flashes of lightning.”

The photo-art works of Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi are visual prayers that require ecstatic and transformative meditation. Visual sublimation of body photography to spiritual structures that mark sacred chambers, like the Chambers Literature in Kabala, this chambers photography shows us an alter-reality in spiritual spheres.

Sometimes it seems like we are observing the Tantric sculpturing of the temples in Khajuraho in India. It is said that the artists of Khajuraho knew the erotic sacred text of the Kama-Sutra. The Kama-Sutra of Ohad Ezrahi is such a text; an erotic poetry emerging from the temple of King Salomon, and from the Merkabah visions of Ezekiel. A visual Song of Songs.

Photography is connected to reality in the way that it is present in front of a landscape, a body, face and object, an ultimate recording of reality. Through digital form transformation the object becomes a subject, the analog reality sublimes into virtual reality and spiritual substantive. In my eyes photography is the most pure medium of plastic art. What painting had been for centuries became photography. Modern painting leading to modern photography creating a post-modern digital imaging. Like sampled and duplicated Trans music, trans-photography duplicated, cut, passed, enlarged, colored, emphasized and mostly – transformed.

“Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him.”

The sacred art of Ohad Ezrahi mark an ancient- new path  for art – art that is connected to ancient rituals in pagan Gods and Goddesses, through mysterious gothic cathedral stain glass, Indian mandalas for mediation and up to dreamlike surrealist montages unveiling the optic subconscious, wild and weird and elucidative.

It is interesting to imagine those works becoming stain glass in the temple of the renewing Hebraic Tribe.

“This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the YHWH. When I saw it, I fell facedown, and I heard the voice of one speaking.”

* Eyal Ben Dov is a senior lecturer in the department of photography in Bezal’el art school in Jerusalem, a curator and a photographer.