You Have Always to Start Anew, 1991

glass, egg, wax, match, paper


Photo: Warhafting Venezian Studio Ltd.

The work articulates a foundational principle in Belu-Simion Fainaru's practice: the convergence between Jewish thought and an ongoing creative journey. It is centred on a boat sailing within a glass of water. Beyond its function as a vessel, the boat becomes an existential symbol. As in Kabbalistic literature, where the individual is likened to a navigator between worlds, here, too, the boat is a body moving through water between order and chaos, between fear and hope. It sets sail toward the unknown, whether in a stormy sea or in an ominous calm. The voyage evokes the artist's condition: his stability is fragile, his course unstructured, and above him hovers the temptation to return to a solid ground, yet only distance from the shore allows for another kind of vision, one that does not submit to the weight of reality, but opens toward the realm of possibility.

The roots of this principle lie in the teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, one of the most innovative thinkers in Jewish philosophy: the idea of continuous beginning, whereby a human being is called to return, time and again, to the point of origin, to the self, not because he has failed, but because life itself is inherently dynamic and in constant flux. The possibility of beginning again is posited as an existential foundation; an understanding that the individual is constituted through ongoing transformation. Fainaru adopts this principle as both a worldview and an artistic practice. He views art not as a finished product, but as a sustained state of becoming, movement, fragility, open questions, and the courage to face the void.

Within the glass rests an egg bearing the inscription: 'Belongs to no place and another time'—a phrase that carries layers of Jewish thought, including the notion of place and time as categories that define existence, while also delimiting it. The sense of non-belonging—the condition of being outside a fixed structure—is described here as a state of transition: that of an artist living between places, cultures, and times. It is precisely through this non-belonging that a deeper sense of belonging emerges. This condition allows for a fresh view of the world, one not bound to existing structures, but open to a continual process of creation and renewal. In a world teeming with crises, uncertainty, and the erosion of meaning, there is a need to return to a raw materiality in which deconstruction enables reconstruction. From these intermediate spaces arises the insight that the possibility of new life, new creation, and new thought begins with the recognition that it is necessary to always start anew.