17 Hashiv’a Street, Netanya. Tal Golani’s grandparents’ private home stands there, still containing their furniture and objects, although they passed away several years ago. The area of the house and surrounding garden is the starting point for Habitat, Golani’s series of paintings.

Golani began the paintings during the Corona lockdowns, working intuitively and freely, without defining the series or thinking about a future exhibition. She depicted rooms and corners from the house that were integral to her childhood experiences, now abandoned. As the series unfolded, they became liberated from both painterly and emotional processes: her repeated attempts at painting figurative details from the inside of the house and her personal link to them, replacing her personal-nostalgic gaze with that of a researcher examining architectural aspects of the site. This is the same gaze she adopted in her previous painting series of abandoned public spaces. 

Golani the grownup painter takes a renewed look at her childhood landscape, the self-evident backdrop to her life as a young girl. It seems that with her gaze of a contemporary researcher she examines her grandparents’ home as a habitat. She documents her impressions on canvas of her architect grandfather’s sculptures and reliefs, her engineer grandmother’s drafting table, and from their design choices as an arena for learning about their lives, businesses, and aesthetic preferences.

The paintings in the series express the intermediary space between the machine (the documenting camera) and the spirit (personal memory). The images are frozen yet unraveled at the same time. At first glance, it seems that the “documentation” strives for precision, to be true to the original, objective and emotionless, among other factors due to its changing cool, bluish tonality. A second glance exposes the loose hand with the personal touch trying to grasp the elusive memory of what is gone but remains imprinted on the artist’s soul. 

The desire to breathe life into the house is especially evident in the wall of birds in the exhibition, inspired by the artist’s grandfather’s sculptures. Golani used masking tape to trace the outlines of the bird sculptures that were hanging on the walls, replicating them to form a flock. The masking tape which Golani usually uses to plan her carefully-made paintings, here becomes light, volumetric sculptural material, seemingly completing the process of liberation and farewell.

Tamar Gispan-Greenberg