Veronique Inbar Art

About Artist's Work

From the text that accompanied the exhibition "Twilight Zone"
Which was exhibited at the Janco Dada Museum in September 2014 and at the Municipal Gallery Rehovot in January 2015.
By Ora Kraus

Inbar declares that in her paintings she seeks to speak of what can not be expressed in speech, to grasp what can not be grasped. The existential elation is the interesting feature of her work. The artist operates from a place of lack of knowledge and doubt and asks from a position of clarity questions that are not answered. Most of her abstract paintings seem to float on paper. There is always more than one meaning in them, and they do not impose interpretation but merely imply at one; They are personal, but not private. Here and there the beginning of a detached figure emerges, and sometimes linear shapes appear without roots, without a grasp, in a movement of floating and searching. The colorful series presents small, powerful drawings in velvety tones.
The red records look like fire flames cut off from the ground, while the green records seem to float. The vegetative images and the images of the roots conjure up images of windless, groundless figures representing the total lack of grip and existential detachment. According to Inbar, although sometimes the reference to her paintings are external images, such as branches of trees, limbs and hair, the result indicates an internal experience that reflects her perceptions and her worldview. The drawings are arranged in one cluster, each one intensifying the next. Some drawings contain two or three small thick lines that look like the tail of the previous painting and the head of the next one. They have a small and significant statement; Some may be blurred, and the hidden in them is much greater than the visible.
The quick and short scrawl that characterizes Inbar's paintings is reminiscent of the concise Haiku poem, composed of three lines and seventeen syllables. The series of characters in Inbar's paintings contains amorphous, unidentifiable figures, some humorous. Their thin and flimsy frames fools the observer by the contrast between their smallness and their power. They are somewhat reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti's sculpted figures-tense, needle-thin figures with elongated limbs that seem almost lost in space. The Giacomatic character represents the existential state of man in the modern world, which experiences passive existence, meaningless and fleeting.
The paintings of Inbar's colorful figures are somewhat optimistic, but this optimism quickly dissipates due to the severed limbs painted on other pages - organs that seem to have mutated into hybrid creatures, to the remains of the original figure. The monochromatic series includes large works that seem to have been taken from the field of biology. The gray-black spots are characterized by dense texture and resemble cells whose breeding is out of control, or a growing bacterial colony that becomes a cohesive volume. Sometimes tiny black pockets of whiteness are created between the black colonies, which resemble a flickering light. In these paintings, Inbar uses high-absorbent papers, on which she drips Chinese ink (in this type of ink and paper the Chinese and the Japanese tend to use for the art of decorative writing - calligraphy). The paper absorbs the drop of ink, which continues to spread, until another ink drop is blocking the way, thus creating the biological-like quantification. The type of ink and its thinness have a decisive influence on the appearance of the painting because of the artist's ability to direct to different shades and thereby cause different sealing of the paper.The starting point for Inbar's work is nonverbal in essence, and the contents rise from the materials - color, ink, line and paper, and from an internal reservoir of images that stems intuitively from the stream of consciousness. The works are in the twilight zone, in between, between emptiness and fullness, between the visible and the hidden, between the chaotic and orderly, between the known and the unknown; In a sleepy area that deals with things that are not usually discussed. Sometimes her work conjures up the mysterious aesthetics of Rod Serrling's famous television series, “The Twilight Zone”, which focused on fantasy or horror and suggested at the end of each episode an element of surprise.

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Hebrew