Final breath is the essential question of Israeli artist Emilio Mogilner’s art. He calls it “1 Breath Time”: holding his breath, he lunges at the canvas with paint brushes, frantically slashing at them with colorful, expressionistic jabs. When the air runs out (sometimes resulting in a loss of consciousness), the painting is done. His message is literal (the body’s overdose of carbon dioxide parallels the processes of the greenhouse effect) as well as symbolic, but the method circumvents logic, he says. He believes that as his oxygen-deprived body kicks into survival mode, the process turns primal, driven by forces that transcend knowledge, technique, or expectations about the outcome.

Mogilner’s inspiration for 1 Breath Time came from personal crisis. In 2001, a masked gunman entered his studio in Rehovot and shot him point-blank with an M16, severing his right arm, his dominant arm, at the shoulder. He jumped out the window with the severed limb to attempt an escape. Slipping toward death, he pictured his one-year old daughter. In a startling burst of strength, he made it to a hospital, where it was reattached. He learned to paint with his left hand (the right never regained full function), but within a year of the attack, gave up as an exercise in futility. But then his brother changed his life with one phrase: breath is time. “When he told me those words, like from the sky, the same as when I saw the face of my little girl, I received a message: 1 Breath Time. This is the only breath that I have for survival,” says Mogilner. “This is the only breath that can lead the human race to social and environmental revolution.”

Now Mogilner and a team of 1 Breath Time artists lead workshops with both Arabs and Israelis, children and adults, to lead them to connect with their “survival momentum,” a visual depiction of their struggle to live. When the breath is gone, says Mogilner, the painting is finished. The last gasp of the human race transformed into a newborn’s first breath.

George MacDonald (from George MacDonald edited by C.S. Lewis):
“Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because He said, Do it, or once abstained because He said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.”

Some material courtesy of Adbusters magazine. To see more of Mogilner's art, visit www.1breathtime.com/