All Things Must Pass

Ran Kasmy-Ilan

A Motel Room

A bed, a small wooden chair with one large drawer and storage space beneath. One chair with a tatty seat cushion, its colors long faded. A phone book, a television set. On the wooden cabinet beside the bed is a broken-down reading lamp. In the drawer there is a bible. Dark curtains obscure any glimpse of the outside. The drapery folds create vertical lines of sun-burnt splotches. The original curtain colors and sun stains are a quiet duo of different eras depicted on the same canvas – the same impenetrable screen that indicates the world beyond and obstructs the residents from approaching it. Paint or wallpaper that have given up are peeling off the walls. A scratched gold frame presents with utmost solemnity a bad oil painting of a waterfall surrounded by trees. A dark and stained carpet of indeterminate hue covers the entire floor space. There is a narrow upright mirror.

It is easy to imagine such a room even if you have never stepped into one or any similar. It is memorialized continuously in American cinema and television. The moving image is a long-standing reference to “stopping places,” such as taverns and inns, places that deconstruct the distinction between belonging and alienness, private and public, and between singular and customary or intermingled.

The lure of the wayside lodging relies on its liminal nature. This is a non-place kind of place. A permanent point, constant, which enables travel beyond its location. A space where people reside without living there, where they meet and yet remain apart. Its entire purpose is to keep things moving. Indeed, despite its immobility it remains in an incessant state of motion: an unending stream of arrivals and departures.

The three modes of impermanence in motels are vacant, reserved, or occupied, and they frequently interchange. Departing lodgers are instantly forgotten. This is a place for people that do not leave their mark. It obliterates the traces of residents on a daily basis, and this erasure is as liberating as it is threatening. It cultivates a potential for the motel to become a place of remoteness, violence, and shame, but equally kindles the potential for hospitality, compassion, and kindness.

CROSSING POINT

American motels began appearing across the US in the 1920s, sprouting alongside the highways. The word “motel,” a combination of motor/hotel, was coined by architect Arthur Heiman for a design he produced, allowing guests to travel by train right up to the door of their rooms.

Throughout three decades, thousands of motels were built across the breath of the United States. This boom ended in the late 1960s as the reputation of motels waned and corporate hotel chains quickly took their place. Nevertheless, motels persisted, surviving long enough to become residential units on the margins of society.

The motel has earned its place beside its classic hotel counterpart specifically because it has different objectives and design. It is located en route, outside city centers, providing a short-term lodging for long travel or a fleeting-constant solution for a road broken repeatedly. It offers no public gathering areas, such as a lobby or dining room, has no entertainment staff or an event hall, no places to mingle and so no need for essentially avoidant social interaction. No ghost encounters.

GHOST INN

Each painting in Elad Larom’s “Ghost Inn” series depicts a dramatic theatrical event in a motel room. These are small paintings of uniform (32x41 cm) format. Each brush stroke is measured. Atop the realistic painting layer presenting the actual room is another, separate and top layer in which the ghosts residing there are sketched in freehand.

Larom presents the rooms in a single format. He positions them one after the next as if they were the different rooms of the same motel. Even their color palette shifts comfortably across the various paintings, like hours of the day or the seasons. Each room is a purgatory, a temporary place of agony but also of purification and catharsis, a place where otherness and likeness are at its nucleus. Each room in a miniature world where one may have a crisis of identity, morality, or memory, a space with the marginal and transitory nature that allows for noble aspirations and self-destruction alike.

The rooms are clearly measured and realistic but the ghosts they contain seem to have been painted by a different hand. They are painted on a discrete layer above the other and in a wildly different style. They are expressive and caricaturistic. But despite the varying techniques, the two do not clash. Rather, they seem to be complementary.

The ghosts bring to the somber rooms an element of illusion while also directing attention to the stubborn material uniqueness of these spaces. Thus, they serve a dual role: first, extracting the individuality of the rooms to imbue them with the dismal allegorical aspect of a Catholic space of torment, and second – a reminder of the culturally-replicated panorama of rooms and their role as units of cultural code with each, like a thin overlay, carrying the memory of every other room just like it that we have seen by David Lynch, Christopher Nolan, the Cohen brothers, or Alfred Hitchcock.

This act of individualization and generalization is mutually interactive. Just as ghosts influence the character of every room, so do rooms impact individual ghosts as they become more abstract as their environs are more dominant, as the rooms make their tenants undergo a process of de-personalization. And is that not the role of hotel rooms? The seemingly universal and ostensibly neutral nature of such accommodations was supposed to have provided more opportunities for individualism, doomed to diminish within it to vanish completely behind a closed door marked by a number instead of a family name.

The ghosts appear in pairs, generally a man and a woman. One has a human form and uses the room in a functional manner (laying on a bed or seated on a chair), while others are more fluid. At times, one emerges in one of the items of furniture as a slightly smiling face, and others appear above a stuffed animal head or romping on the wallpaper. Sometimes, they are a cliche of a ghost shaped as translucent clouds or curling smoke or a burning cigarette, wide-eyed and grinning madly like some deranged cousin of Casper the Friendly Ghost. In many paintings, these apparitions attempt to make shadow figures with their hands, amusing each other like children, communicating through animal shadows or trying to have some tangibility, projecting their presence on the room in the hopes of becoming corporeal.

These ghost couples are not there for their own purpose. They embody the abandoned energy of the hotel space, populating the intermediary dimension that Larom delineates for them between upper and lower worlds, between the physical body and the mental body, between precise brushstrokes to frenetic movement, between opaque and transparent in the geology of color stratification.

Akin to motel rooms that distance their occupants from others and from “real life” with their ramshackle walls, shut doors, and closed curtains because there is no outside, the soul is also a separate room untouched by natural sunlight. Larom’s motel rooms (and not just his own) are therefore a landscape of consciousness, a place outside place. Where one goes to and one departs from, where one lives as if they had died and die as if they lived.

Nothing happens, but all things must pass.

E.Larom