Three series of paintings constitute veteran artist Dalia Bachar’s new exhibition, summarizing three chapters from her multi-faceted biography. \A grocery list, Neima Sasson Writes Poems, and I Was Escared, are three series of paintings created between the years 2007-2014, never exhibited as a single entity. In this exhibition they are intertwined and assemble to sound eloquently and fluently Bachar’s unique charged voice on her childhood in her parents’ house, her identity as a child, woman and artist, and the dissonance between her feelings of nostalgia and sentiment of not belonging.

Milk, black bread, oil, sugar, rice, eggs and semolina are fundamental foodstuffs for life and at the same time represent the house blessing. In oversized childish handwriting over a lit substrate of paint layers, Bachar uses this list at the center of the Grocery List series, to also reference her father’s trade as a grocery owner but mainly to establish a synthesis between the quotidian, banal existence taken for granted and the apex of artistic creativity, because “No flour, no Tora”.
Childhood, choices and acceptance are represented in the series I was escared. Darkness, nightmares, strangers, pain, loneliness and separation are the territory of fear in a childhood where reality is intertwined with imagination and stimuli, to establish existential significance. Bachar is preoccupied with this fear which constituted a defining moment in the life of a girl, exceptional in her laboring environment. When Bachar twists the word “scared” she downplays the fright of the girl she was, artistically intensifying her on one hand while on the other she appeals at the adult viewer’s sympathy to contain her fears.

Neima Sasson Writes Poems is the name of a short story by Amalya Kahana-Carmon about Neima, an adolescent girl falling in love with Ezekiel – her teacher, but it’s also a story about a girl aspiring to become a writer. This resolution contains a rebellious element or at least an attempt to emerge from the boundaries of daily convention. Neima knows that there is a chasm between the evident reality and what is contained beyond it. She also knows that she will have to articulate this chasm in her work as a writer. This series sealing Bachar’s childhood chapter is an allegory and replication of her choice of art as a source, an expression, a vessel of life. Just as Neima was determined on her calling as a writer, so was Bachar exposed to her vocation as an artist.

All the works on paper in uniform size of 70X100 cm form windows into the artist’s soul. Leon Battista Alberti, 15th century painter and architect, described how he approached painting the reality facing him: “First of all, on the surface which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen.” For Alberti the picture’s frame is a window to the scenery, to reality. Bachar uses the painting’s frame as a mirror to the soul telling the secrets of its bold, rebellious spirit on one hand, lyric and delicate on the other. The outcome is conscience paintings, eloquent and spectacular.

Closing: 08.04.18