Tala Madani, an Iranian painter. I love the strong contrasts in her work, her humor and her control of painting. I appreciate how she attempts to trace the materiality of painting. The way she combines language in painting speaks to me, especially since I find it to be a very difficult task, and she achieves it with such precision. I also love her ability to choose images that move us without having to explain why they are so loaded; we feel it without being able to explain it.
I'm interested in the dialog between the virtual and the physical worlds. The screen user experience fascinates me, and I search for ways to copy its material characteristics and the manner in which the world is viewed through it. I aspire to highlight the boundaries of the screen, the moments in which the screen is a material that may crack or may blind us while still directing us somewhere through Waze. I wonder what qualities were lost while we were watching the screen. As a reaction, I try to enhance the tactility of my work. I want to arouse the spectators, draw them in and push them away, make them want to touch the works and decipher how they were created.
I've been making art from a very young age. I vividly remember how I started painting so obsessively, in a manner that isn’t very common among 4-year-old children. I stayed up all night and drew a map of the world.
In Shenkar, I fell in love with printmaking and in thoughts concerning the effect of photography on our lives. I combined different mediums in every possible way, may it be physically or conceptually. I appropriated different possibilities of material and concept, and played with the balance between them. Even if the result is an oil painting, a variety of hybrid processes preceded it. Without the process, the work would have been incomplete.
Omer Shach, 30, interdisciplinary artist. Lives in Tel Aviv.
