Painting, for me, is a way of engaging with questions of existence, identity, and boundary. I am concerned with both physical and intangible borders, as well as with time itself—as a force that distances personal and collective pasts and renders them inaccessible. I live in the Golan Heights, a geographically and culturally charged space, and this environment nourishes the central body of my work, which engages with the Golan landscape and with questions of neighborliness, separation, and the ways in which individuals and societies draw lines between themselves.
In a parallel body of work, I return to members of my family and to my childhood through photographic images. Painting allows me to attempt to grasp lost time, to linger over details of people dear to me, even as they change or disappear. Through the act of image-making, I examine whether it is possible to preserve memory—or at least slow its erosion.
In both cases, my work relies on photography as an essential stage in the process. I go out into the field, select frames, and photograph, or I choose images from family albums, and then return to the studio to trace the image through paint. The language of photography is consciously present in the paintings, referencing what was once undeniably there and was fixed through the act of photography. The photographic layer functions as a screen that creates distance while simultaneously allowing me the security to engage with charged subjects through realism. In oil paint, I search for the image through the slow application and removal of paint; its sculptural quality imbues the image with physical weight in addition to conceptual weight. In watercolor, the image emerges quickly, almost immediately, yet the medium itself is bodiless, leaving the image as a reflection that cannot be grasped.
The paintings appear realistic, yet realism is the result of a search rather than its goal. I paint out of a need to reach an essence or to understand something that lies beyond my grasp: a place, a person, or an other I cannot truly reach. Painting is also a means of persistent excavation of details, through which I attempt to see differently and to offer myself the possibility of a more active and deeper form of seeing—even if it is destined to fail.
