In a large-scale series of paintings, Ohad Shaaltiel freezes the magnificent fire spectacle in the sky like an instant grasping hell-and-joy.
Wood coal, yellow sulfur, and potassium nitrate are the materials firecrackers are made of. They carve the skies on Independence Day festivities in all countries for all peoples, icons of savage, animal ecstasy and moments of pure bliss and freedom. Shaaltiel has been spending his summers in America for over half a jubilee. Every Fourth-of-July he witnesses the infinite pyrotechnic spectacle produced by Americans, as he experiences his own battlefield. Shining light and cannon thunders, the distance from his homeland, other people’s celebration and joy are charged with vital memories and gape in his soul a dissonance that he has been trying to capture in his work.

Coal, tar, water and oil colors, engraving and scratching on canvas and wood are the materials and techniques Shaaltiel uses in the series to grasp the flash between the sublime and the traumatic. First, Shaaltiel pours the tar on large canvases or small sheets of paper, transforming the bedding into darkness. From the forms and layers chaotically created by the dark substance, he meticulously captures in diluted oil or watercolors, the colorful joyous image: the form of a firecracker rising in the sky, the brilliant landscape visible for an instant and the light flooding the earth. The chaos dictates the order just as the big-bang created Genesis. Orchards in the Sharon, Carmel forests, America and Gaza materialize from the canvas as in a magic show.
Amazement, wonder and joy are replaced by the pain of memory when as he comes to complete the image, Shaaltiel scratches and reduces the bedding rendering the canvas scarred and the paper crushed.

Chaos, genesis and destruction, ever-present in Shaaltiel’s creation circle, ever influenced by his life story, reach in this series a spectacular balance, as in Dalia Rabikovich’s “Stains Of Light” (from Love of the Golden Apple) where she describes the gentle love and the great passion between the dark and the gilded.

Stains of light
And in this matter, dark, stains of light were stamped…
And there is gentle love between the darkness and the gold.

And they are embracing and peaceful, void of sound or gust
And the light trickles and kisses this matter with its lips
And the darkness turns its body like a well for the gold stains.

Closing: 20.06.16