Tal Golani | Window Box

Tal Golani – Window Box
Text by Tali Kayam

Tal Golani‘s first exhibition at the Zemack Contemporary Art marks a peak in the process of exploring the boundaries of architectural space. In previous works that she has exhibited, she rebuilt theaters, various sports fields, and playgrounds inside the white cube space. In her last exhibition, the “Sliding Door,” Golani wrapped the exhibition space with a duplication of itself and created an image of The Artists’ Residence in Herzliya with a 19-meter picturesque installation. Now, at Zemack, Golani combines the two practices that characterize and drive her process of creation: she has transferred one exhibition space into another.

This time, the work intrudes upon an architectural space that was not taken into account at the time of its creation: the lower floor of Zemack Gallery. Here, the walls are met by close-fitting pillars that divide and separate each of the painted corners of her pieces from the walls. This new separation changes the rhythm with which we view the work. At any moment, it enables us to look at the painting as a single, individual work, or as a collection of works. It is possible to dive into the composition that exists at any given moment and to discover the colorful blend that exists, only in that moment.

This is a move of de-construction that takes place, as has been previously described, in contemporary architecture, as well. De-construction, not in the sense of “tearing the painting into pieces,” but as an attitude and novel suggestion for the observation of the work: through the dilemmas inherent in Golani’s process of creation, which include infinite considerations, mathematical calculations, computerized simulations, and attempts to depict, as precisely as possible, textures and colors, in unusual ways – for example, routine office supplies, duct tape, and makeup sponges.

In the same way that when examined close up, a continuous line is exposed as a collection of adjacent points, the exhibition at Zemack reveals that the installation is a sequence of interconnected drawings. Breaking down this sequence allows the reexamination and redefinition of the boundaries of the space, of the separation that supposedly exists between the outside and the inside. The paintings now become open windows to the depicted reality and not, as coined by Leonardo da Vinci, a window to reality. Moreover, the exhibition at Zemack includes a series of eight new works depicting plants. Tal Golani relates to these works as windows, and signals to us, the viewers, that the next stage of her journey goes outside the boundaries of the scene being observed: to the outside, to the organic, to an environment that is seemingly not designed by a human hand. However, the plants painted by Golani do not grow wild in nature. They are painted into planters; a small architectural structure that is also a buffer, separator, and divider. This structure attempts to dictate a borderline, that the structure will be forced to negotiate when the plant grows, when the painting spreads beyond the meticulous design of its creator.