Yifat
Bezalel

In my country, where collective conflict is never far, I feel we have lost our soul and I grieve this loss. The ripples of war touch all aspects of life, compelling us, the people, to dull our senses in order to escape the memories of our shattered history. We are forced to flee our childhood realms and remain distant from the destruction we have shared since the days of the Temple. We cease to see the ancient divine presence (“Shekinah” in Hebrew) which has lost its home and is present in all things. Our averted glance is the grief and loss that permeates my work. In my drawings, I attempt to describe the godly presence that emerges from the ruins of history. My perspective is universal, exceeding beyond this land. I perceive the divine presence as generous to all, transcending religion. It is the unfathomed part of nature, like the sun’s diamonds over the water. God, the masculine deity, is missing. Conversely, the divine presence is pronouncing her sorrow. At times she is unwhole, at times whole, lyrical, and quiet. In my drawings, I wish to soothe the sorrow of the divine presence that resonates within me by the Hand of Creation. Over the years I have absorbed the refined craftmanship of the Renaissance, repeatedly drawing, mostly Michealangelo’s “La Pietà”. This aesthetic brings the sublime closer to me and allows me to touch it, to approach it. For me, La Pietà symbolizes a part of the divine presence. Through it, I aim to tell about my contradiction-ridden country. The lament of La Pietà demonstrates the tension between the Jewish prohibition on creating statues and images, and my specific attraction to it. My heart lies in the abstract, which lacks a physical image, yet my eye is drawn to the concrete, lyrical form. In my drawings, the images of deity and divinity descend and tell a tangible story: this is the personal loss of a heroine woman whose beloved comes back as a living-dead from the battlefield. In his absence, the heroine tries with all her might to build a house. The personal story serves a focused, magnified lens through which to view the universal story. The house that was destroyed continues to echo with the heartbreak of the real place in which we live. The divine presence yearns for her land and home; perhaps comforting her son, perhaps her lover. In my work, I transition from video to drawing and from drawing to video. Often, the video is the black box of a drawing, containing essences that reveal themselves to me only later. Layers of pencil drawings, describing the ghost of the divine, homeless presence left to wander lost in empty palaces, brings to life the video that morphs between different forms (sometimes animation, sometimes a silent story) but is photographed simply, a mirror image of the drawing that requires only paper and pencil. Through my restless movement, I wish to evoke a reflection on incompleteness and the difficulty of separation, and particularly concerning the creation of grief and mourning, presenting a home that is a mere illusion.