Tali Benbassat | Not in the Shadow of a Great Tree

Curator: Yair Barak

 

There are spaces that do not seek shelter, but rather articulate a condition of existence: transient, fragile, open to change. Tali Benbassat’s exhibition Not in the Shadow of a Great Tree moves within such liminal spaces – between painting and photography, between structured order and fortuitous intuition, between material memory and an image that takes shape and unravels concurrently. The exhibition’s title offers a dual stance: a departure from a source of authority, shadow, or protective tradition, while also searching for another possibility of standing in the world – without a clear hierarchy, without a secure anchor, and from a position of vulnerability that is also freedom. This position renounces dependence on father and mother figures, while, at the same time, acknowledging their existence in the world.

The two series featured in the exhibition – the tents series and the series of photographs based on sculptural arrangements– maintain a relationship of resonance and displacement. Both explore temporary structures, acts of assembly and disassembly, and the way in which image and material carry the memory of a human action, even when the body itself is absent.

In the tents series, Benbassat places painting on the line between figuration and abstraction, and between visibility and disappearance. As both shape and concept, the tent (which is by no means an actual tent), does not function here as a defined place, but as a state: a provisional structure, a sign of transit, a home that is not a home, a shelter built out of an awareness of its precariousness. The paintings are born out of an ongoing process of addition and subtraction, concealment and exposure, construction and deconstruction – a painterly action in which resolution is suspended time and again in order to listen to what the painting itself wishes to be. This process, where the material and the gesture become a seismograph of the psyche, is at the heart of the series. 

The layers of thinned paint, tempera, graphite, and pastels are not merely technical means; they create a system of distinct painting qualities: transparency, movement, traces of the body and hand. The painting does not seek to weave a story but to expose the conditions of its creation, the tension between planning and chance and between physical action and extended moments of pause. Benbassat acts out of disciplined intuition, combining urgency with stillness, until that rare moment when, as she puts it, “the painting starts breathing.”

Facing the paintings is the series of photographs, which is rooted in a different, yet essentially related action. The starting point is the scanning of reproduction photos of Modernist works from art books – mediated relics of artworks by artists such as Hans Arp and Alberto Giacometti – which are subjected to further deconstruction through acts of enlargement and scanning. Benbassat does not replicate the historical image; she reveals the mechanism of its emergence. The original halftone pattern, the tonal transitions, and printing artifacts become prominent, to the point that the original work fades away, and all that’s left of it are marks, traces, and fragments.

These relics are joined by three-dimensional objects, which at times disclose their function and at others remain unidentified. These are pieces of Modernist furniture arranged in the studio like an impromptu architectural set. The forms lean, balance, and almost collapse; the photograph captures a moment of transient stability within a delicate relationship between objects. The arrangements are reminiscent of childhood games of building a “house” out of blankets and furniture – a primary act of creating a territory, of organizing a world out of available and fragile materials. But here, private memory encounters the history of Modernism and its rational language and dismantles it from the inside.

And so, the entire exhibition becomes an intermediate space: neither architecture nor landscape, neither documentation nor fiction, but a system of temporary structures that hold emotional and conceptual possibilities. The tents and photographed arrangements do not offer permanent shelter, but a temporary stay within uncertainty – a place where one can reexamine the relationship between inside and outside, between memory and matter, between personal and cultural history and the creative act itself. 

Not in the Shadow of a Great Tree, then, seeks to reimagine art that does not depend on an authoritative shadow or a closed narrative, but rather exists within a constant movement of experimentation, attentiveness, and assembly. This is a space where fragility is not a weakness but a condition of vitality – a place where the image, like the transient home, is rebuilt each time anew.