When he was young, Simon Gaon says, he felt most comfortable at night; he felt as if he were invisible. Now he works at night, and night is one of his themes. Other themes are the sea, the city and its street people, dematerialized and transformed by night so that shapes dissolve into shadows, reflections, trajectories of light. Paint takes on a life of its own; a seascape under the night sky become a pulsating combination ot wave and cloud swirls. Faces with the look of Old Testament prophets burst out of the dark like flares. Gaon's tactile molding of the paint led him inevitably to sculpture, which for him is a medium as volatile as paint. He applies wet cement on craggy shapes and on natural stone forms whose craggy shapes and eroded surfaces look as if they have beenexcavated from the earth of an ancient civilisation. Indeed, when he visited the Assyrian room at the Metropolitan Museum, Gaon had the feeling that a part of him was in those sculptures. He does in fact so much resemble the Assyrian statues that he could have posed for them.His lineage connects him to this ancient world; for his family is descended from Persian and Turkish Jews who migrated to New York from Bukhara in Southern Russia. For Gaon, the city, the sea, the night are part of an interior landscape that dissolves the familiar identity ofthings. Shaped by his personal history, which he links to a larger historical vision, his art becomes a theater in which his themes are constantly reenacted. His is a spiritual quest to break down the boundaries between outer forms and inner reality, between things seen and felt.

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