Instruction:
Larry Abramson and Tal Yerushalmi

For two years, Alma Bachar went to the beach in Tel Aviv every Sunday to take photographs, attempting to capture the radiance of the sun dancing on the waves. Next, she sketched shapes taken from the photographs on cloth and filled them with tar shapes. Her dream of using tar to create a “perfect” composition of water was doomed to failure from the start – after all, tar is wild and playful just like water.

In the original photographs, the glinting of the sun’s reflection came out “burnt”. In the drawings, these same areas of total brightness – burnt and untreated – were left exposed, while the dark shapes took on radiance and glitter.

The resulting works are a celebration of the black, thick fluid, the dark and hidden material, the hidden and the concealed. A celebration of dark sparkle that one can linger on and play with. Within this celebration lie hidden sentences, partly exposed and partly concealed. With their help we can explore the relationship forged between the viewer and the work in the moment of observation.

Photo: Achikam Ben-Yosef