Tali Navon
Land scape
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
in the introductory pages of this article. What caught our attention at once was the anthropological nature of your research and the way it brings a new level of significance to the ubiquitous, still-conflictual relationship between abstraction due to the environment and realism. When walking our readers through the genesis of Forward, would you tell our readers how do you view the concepts of the real and the imagined playing out within your works?
There is the reality of what is happening around us and there is the abstract of what is happening in our mind. This is precisely what Forward is about and why it is composed of a combination of real and abstract materials. Reality and abstract actually are interlinked. Reality is in the eye of the observer and so the abstract can change from person to person. Forward presents my interpretation of reality and, of course, each viewer can create a new layer of interpretation of it that continues it. That is what humans are and that is the human experience – building thought upon thought. So reality is the jumping-off point, but reality can be different for each person. In practice, the relationship starts off as being between the artist and the work. Afterwards, it is between the work and the viewer. So a piece that begins in solitude ends with bringing people together. I see that as the essence of life – the relationships, the connections and the threads that tie everything together. One of my paintings that delves into this issue is on display at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in the exhibition“ Wire( less) Connections,” until March 2017.