Coincidences

In recent years, Tali Benbassat has moved away from the narrative anchor that once characterized her paintings, shifting from works with a clearly identifiable photographic source toward a more fundamental engagement with undefined forms. In the image-saturated reality in which we live, she seeks to create a territory free of names, titles, and narratives: a small island of quiet within the incessant flow of recognizable and identifiable images, where the painterly act, the line, and the mark cease to function merely as means and instead become the central subject. “These are paintings that do not function as a bead within an endless string of references and allusions,” she says, “but exist as images within a separate and autonomous system of signs, referring solely to the singular moment in which the work was painted and to the emotional state that accompanied the act of painting.”

Benbassat’s interest in undefined forms began with an encounter with remnants from a laser-cutting factory located near her studio in south Tel Aviv. She collected the leftover material—the pieces remaining after shapes had been cut from larger sheets—and became fascinated by the forms between forms, by those intermediate zones lacking clear definition: an open space she calls “the place between places … a frontier zone of consciousness.”

In her new body of work, Benbassat creates a painterly territory of “almost-forms”—forms that are almost familiar, almost defined, seemingly disciplined and ordered, yet subtly disrupted. The forms are flat, their boundaries distinct, and they accumulate one over another in varying degrees of transparency, leaving an open space for the viewer’s interpretation. Benbassat seeks to distance herself from the idea of an absolute whole, engaging instead with dismantling and construction, fragmentation and recombination. At the same time, her works engage with the tradition of modernist abstract painting, evoking urban landscapes or fragmented architectural plans, traces of three-dimensional structures flattened onto a plane. In doing so, they also recall the large-scale wall reliefs installed in public buildings in Israeli kibbutzim during the 1950s.

The exhibition brings together a body of oil paintings and works employing printmaking techniques, particularly etching, which has become central to Benbassat’s practice in recent years. Both bodies of work revolve around different combinations of amorphous forms. The exhibition’s central work consists of twenty-five aquatint prints—a labor-intensive and complex manual printmaking technique that enables the reproduction of forms and continuous tonal areas while retaining traces of the artist’s hand.

Not only do the forms combine within each individual print to generate different compositions, but the prints themselves are assembled to create a large, three-dimensional work rich in references to diverse artistic traditions. The prints are mounted on wooden supports at varying heights and angles, emphasizing processes of dismantling and reconstruction, as though the forms were elements in a modular building game. This construction also reinforces the work’s affinity with the modernist wall reliefs that were widespread in Israel in the mid-twentieth century. The use of exposed wood further suggests a subtle reference to the Israeli tradition of Want of Matter (Dalut HaHomer), which flourished from the 1960s through the 1980s, while the deliberately traditional technique of etching evokes the work of earlier printmakers.

Etching has historically been associated with the reproduction of works of art, and its prominence has diminished in recent decades. Yet it remains a complex technique, saturated with historical associations on the one hand and unexpected discoveries on the other, as every copper plate reveals new grooves, marks, and stains. It is a technique that moves between painting and photography: the manual work performed on the plate is entirely painterly, yet, as in photography, the duration of exposure to the material affects the image and determines its varying degrees of darkness.

In Benbassat’s work, the inherently romantic and dramatic character of the technique is redirected toward a modernist and contemporary sensibility. In the digital age, etching has been liberated from its functional role as a means of reproducing images and can once again operate as a distinctive artistic medium. Each plate is a singular event, behaving in unpredictable ways and revealing its own scratches, scars, and imperfections; no two impressions are entirely identical. Benbassat’s prints, with their pronounced material presence, thus return printmaking to the realm of intricate craftsmanship, producing each time an artwork with an individual and irreducible presence.

The exhibition’s title, Coincidences, refers both to the dismantling of the image and to the different, unexpected combinations that emerge from it, as well as to the element of chance inherent in the processes of recombination and reconstruction. Chance is also intrinsic to the making of an etching and part of the fascination of artistic creation itself. For, much like the act of making art, “a coincidence is a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances that have no apparent causal connection.”

Ravit Harari