Page - 110 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

opposed to the eternal, divine point of view which dominated art over the pre- vious centuries. The description of the world through the light entering the lens of the observer’s eye turns the discrete observer – the artist – into the focal point of the world. The painting “Death of a Soldier on a Mondrian Battlefield” by Chaya Agur (fig. 4) is a good demonstration of the perspective technique. The painter said that she was reacting to the theory of painting of Pieter Cornelis Mondrian. Mondrian, a Dutch painter and one of the founders of Modernism, painted in primary colours and in accordance with the golden ratio in an attempt to sim- plify the components of aesthetics. According to Mondrian, these elements are the basic foundation of his “reality”, there is no representation of “time” in this reality. In the painting “Death of a Soldier on a Mondrian Battlefield”, Chaya Agur inserts the linear time of perspective into Mondrian’s timeless world. Lin- ear time contains the tenses – past, present and future – and thus Agur repre- sents death as belonging to the non-eternal time of perspective. The soldier’s grave, the canons and the fields of colour converge on a single point, the vanish- ing point of the perspective. Perspective is limited: it cannot see space or time beyond the vanishing point, and death in the painting represents temporality. Fig 4: Chaya Agur, Death of a Soldier on a Mondrian Battlefield, oil on canvas, 80 x 60 cm. 110 | Bina Nir www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 95–116