Photo Credit: Hagit Lalo
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art exhibit titled “Hagit Lalo: A Painter who Begins at the End”, is a comprehensive showing of the works of the Israeli abstract expressionist who died young but not before making a name in the world of Israeli expressionism. Though Lalo died before reaching the age of thirty, her paintings possess a distinct style and breadth of skill.
Shown at this particular exhibit were paintings thematically and formally similar: large square canvases in thickly and easily applied paint. She painted large swaths of overlapping and juxtaposed colors. Some of the works were reminiscent of distorted landscapes.
But for the most part they appeared entirely abstract, representative of nothing, and drew my attention to her intuitive understanding of color and texture. Her paintings didn’t express meaning; they demanded not to be understood, but experienced .
As Lalo’s paintings are untitled, this notion of anti-representation is all the more clear. Perhaps they draw inspiration from real nature, but the representation is so diluted on the canvas that Lalo creates a language that is entirely her own. She communicates in the experience of color and texture, speaking in paint, thinking in color relationships, but never through straightforward representation.
The hand of the artist is evidently clear, and perhaps it is only my own experience in painting that enables me to envision her looking at her canvas from twenty feet back, trying to place that missing link that will complete the image, that will create a painting that possesses a logic entirely its own.
In that sense, I see Lalo’s work as expressive of the very essential nature of painting.
She speaks in a language that is purely the interaction of color and shape. It is intuitive and experiential, and perhaps fundamental to her work as well, it is beautiful in its simplicity. To ascribe a reason, a logic to the painting, that is beyond the paint itself, beyond what Lalo put to the canvas, seems futile, when her work is so eloquently its own meaning.
Lalo is a standout example for the merits of abstract painting. To limit art to what we understand is to ignore the remarkable sensitivity that artists like Lalo have to the very physical and experiential qualities of painting.
Color, shape, texture—these are features that are self sustaining in their meaning. Like anything in the natural world, they have the ability to give pleasure to people, to stimulate thought, emotional response, even just pure appreciation of the physical world. That one can experience a painting the way one experiences a beautiful view is certain. Both can both be breathtaking. I saw this in Lalo’s work, whose paintings made the value of abstract art eminently clear. The beauty in her work was made evident with her were ability to create something that seems so casual, but is precise in its harmoniousness. Every square canvas had its own set of rules, a balance that was sometime precarious and thrilling, sometimes chaotic, sometimes relieving and cathartic. Her paintings are articulate in their empathetic use of color, seeming to create both open and intimate spaces for the viewer. She creates infinite moments of contemplation in her haphazard or careless seeming juxtaposition of colors. There is no one meaning in her works, and so her works can mean anything and everything.
To look at the work of a painter that understands paint, that communicates in a language of experience, is to understand that the most arbitrary (dare I say, meaningless) forms of art are the most essential to understanding the value of creative work. Lalo evokes emotion, experience, sensation through her indecipherable, imageless works. To say that her paintings are abstract because they have no meaning is to choose to see nothing where one can see everything.