The artistic practice of Tali Gai is born out of an encounter with places that have marked her spirit and incite an investigation. Her works, which employ numerous layers of differing temporalities, catalyze a reappearance of the depths of the past in the present.
Starting with found photographs that have been marked by time, veritable witnesses of the past, Tali Gai develops work that is both graphic and pictural. She hides certain parts of the found image while revealing others. She pushes the archival image to its limit, creating a field of debris in which future events can emerge. In the pictural materiality of her paintings, subtle nuances of color appear. A mirage emerges. Another landscape looms. Like a Rorchach Ink Blot Test, these forms open a space of projection, a mental image. The spectator plunges into a troubling temporal abyss. This metamorphosis of the image creates a distress, an ambiguity. From a representation of the real, the photograph is transformed into a sign, a sign that delivers the buried flaws of the past into the present and an image that emerges as a symptom of the paradoxes of history.
A painter who creates images, Tali Gai accentuates, as well, the force of her work by exploring, through a game of assemblage, the spatial placement of her works. Each painting is a painting made on numerous canvases, permitting, like a puzzle, several possible combinations, opening up the possibility of new interpretations. The blank space, the focal point between each pair of canvases, evokes an opening, a wound. By doubling the archival images, the artist achieves a new abstract image. A feeling of uncanniness emerges. Through this game of decomposition and recomposition, she underlines the double-life of historical events and interrogates the absurdity of human constructions.
Pauline Lisowski