And All the Paintings Will Not Be Covered

Vardit Gross: Talia, dear, you are a very active painter and have published two books of your drawings—Last City (2011) and Homeland B1 (2016). This is your third book, and you told me it didn’t begin as a planned catalog project, but rather grew out of a project shown in the “White Gloves Room” at the Artist Book Fair at Artport. How is a book born?

Talia Israeli: The beginning of this book lies in a one-off artist’s book I made. I work with spray paint and masking tape, and a lot of residue from painted masking tape accumulates in my studio. I feel a need to keep reusing these leftovers, because sometimes, in the negative of the shapes, there is additional beauty and discovery. So I made a work in the form of a book from them, which was shown in the “White Gloves Room” at the fair. The designer Or Segal saw the book there and told a mutual friend who was with her that she wanted to work with this artist and make a book. The friend knew that I wanted to make a book and connected us. From that book, Or got a sense of the direction I was aiming for and the kind of aesthetic that would suit the works. That one-off book functioned as a kind of distillation of the work, and it opened up a window for us to imagine the current book.

One of the things that immediately stands out when holding the book is the color. On the one hand, it reflects a decade of works that are almost colorless—many shades of gray and Xerox—and on the other, the strong presence of fluorescent orange.

It’s a slow process that began about a decade ago and reached a kind of peak in the exhibition One of the Mountains, shown at the Jerusalem Artists’ House. The series of mountain and landscape paintings, painted on wooden panels and referring to Jerusalem, had pink masking tape attached along their upper edge; under fluorescent light, this created a kind of glowing pink halo. Since most of the works in the book are in black, white, and gray, this orange added color and light, disrupting the monochromatic absoluteness of the works. It also linked the images to the present in some way. In the past, I would generate light within the paintings—from the pigment itself, from the image, and the act of painting—whereas here the light comes from outside the painting. It’s not an effect that photographs well; you really feel it in the exhibition space, and it can take time to decipher exactly what you’re seeing.

Or Segal incorporated this theme into the book’s design language. The color recurs throughout all the text pages, in a way that somewhat echoes the spray-paint gesture. Along the edge of the book, the halo is visible—like in the paintings themselves in their original installation—but only in the sections that contain text. So when the book is closed, you can actually see where the text is and where the works are—the pink functions as a kind of external index.

This is essentially a book about books—it encapsulates a decade of your thinking about the aesthetics of print, reproductions, and Xerox. All the works are based on landscape images taken from books. Why?

Yes, almost all of them. In the first chapter, for instance, I worked with early Renaissance frescoes, stemming from my interest in landscape, murals, and graffiti. I translated those colorful paintings into Xerox in order to rethink them—almost like taking an X-ray of a painting. The next body of work evolved from old black-and-white printed books—knowledge of the land guidebooks that I found discarded on the street. The paintings themselves were made using a kind of “lean” technique that masquerades as print, so the idea of bringing this entire process back into a book became very natural. I think that after years of painting landscapes, it became more relevant and interesting for me to think about landscape through culture and its representation within it—more directly and explicitly—so that it would be clear that the landscape in the painting is, in essence, a kind of quotation.

In retrospect, I realized that the whole Xerox trajectory actually began during my studies at Bezalel in 1999. A friend photographed me from a distance on a busy street in New York—confused, just after a breakup—without my knowing. About a month later, I received an envelope at home with an A4 Xerox print capturing that moment. When I made the work from that photograph at Bezalel, I enlarged the image manually, carved stencils at the scale of a huge wall over several days, and then spray-painted the image back onto the wall at life size. That was the first serious spray-paint work I made, before returning to this technique again about a decade ago. I felt I had to include this work in the book, as a kind of point of departure and a memory, which is also a self-portrait.

The Jerusalem project is an interesting example of working with reproductions. How do you paint a city that is so saturated and charged, one that has already been painted from every possible angle?

I grew up in Jerusalem, left it, and avoided painting it for years. When I felt an urgent need to return to looking at it, I asked myself how—and whether—it was even possible. Then I realized that the way the landscape was first depicted in Western painting, and Jerusalem in particular, closely resembles the city as I know it. That was quite astonishing to me and made me want to use that point of departure to add my own contemporary perspective.

At the time, painters working in the service of the Church had to embed the myth of Jesus within a tangible reality, so they inserted his figure into landscapes—even though they had never actually been there. I removed the figures from those Renaissance paintings and began painting only the “backgrounds,” the imagined city they had so compellingly invented. This activated many questions regarding mechanisms of representation, mythology, and how all of this relates to the experience of the city and its status.

When I brought everything together, a city emerged that isn’t real, yet feels familiar. People at the exhibition said, “Oh, this is such-and-such street.” They felt they recognized and knew it, even though these were remakes of paintings from 700 years ago, painted in Italy, based on the painters’ conception of the Holy Land. It sharpened for me the question: what actually came first? And how does the representation of Jerusalem shape the way I see the city? Is there something about it that made it fertile ground for the growth of myths—from the Binding of Isaac, through the story of Jesus, to the present day and all its madness?

This is particularly interesting, because in the history of painting, looking at landscape was understood as a space in which one could “liberate the eye” from conventions—a space outside of culture. Of course, this notion has long since changed, and today “landscape” is a cultural category that exists between visual clichés and a space of discovery. That is why I stopped painting landscapes from direct observation.

Over the course of this decade, you moved from classical oil-on-canvas painting to wall painting and working on found surfaces. What led to this shift?

Between the first wall painting and this chapter, which began in 2017, I painted in a more traditional way—oil on canvas. I had a kind of hidden envy of street painting—made fast, for a specific place. I envied art that could exist in the real world, that became part of how a city works and feels. From the very beginning, my painting resonated with the aesthetics of graffiti. Spray paint felt like an authentic material for the Israeli condition, for its brutality and roughness. To me, painting that is overly refined and polished often feels distant from our everyday life, which is so saturated with trauma and violence.

All the surfaces I worked on were collected from the street. In Herzliya, I discovered entire worlds of painting supports—shelves, cabinets that people had thrown away. I feel that, for now, I’ve exhausted the act of buying a clean canvas from a store and stretching it over a frame. When I see a piece of wood in the street, I can associate it with a moment in time, with the home it was discarded from—it already carries a charge.

Even though the book includes several different exhibitions, there’s a sense of unity—in the color, the graphic treatment—that makes it feel like a single body of work, an artist’s book organized around one concept. And yet you chose to include installation views as well.

There was a need to create an internal logic within a very large body of work, so we structured it somewhat like the travel guidebooks from which some of the exhibitions originated, and divided the book into chapters: Jerusalem, other local landscapes, and erased wall paintings (which are site-specific works). Each chapter also includes installation photographs and texts relating to that body of work (the closing text by Einat Gabai-Levi serves as a kind of summary of the entire trajectory).

The moment I shifted to working with spray paint, I became a painter who makes painterly installations. The paintings are more tightly connected to one another—they form a kind of chain, and they are made in relation to the space and the wall. Sometimes it’s a massive wall painting, sometimes a small one, and sometimes a painting on a volumetric support. The topography of the painting itself, and the relationships formed between the space and the works, are critical—and I wanted the book to show that as well.

The last solo exhibition included in the book, And All the Paintings Will Not Cover, was shown at the gallery in Kibbutz Be’eri just before October 7. It’s almost surprising that this is not a series created after the outbreak of the war.

I had very difficult feelings even before, although of course I had no idea what was to come. Artists have the ability to function like a kind of seismograph—sensing the ground and the tremor before it happens—because they are engaged in looking. I remember that people from Be’eri, a place that felt magical and almost utopian to me then, came to the exhibition and said, “Why are you so somber? Is this the same land? What is this cloud hovering over your existence?” And I wondered whether we were living in the same country.

This was a few months before October 7. The gallery was destroyed, and that moment of my last exhibition became, for me, like a kind of “freeze-frame.” For the book’s cover, Or used a stencil of the Lamentation of Christ—Mary holding Jesus—but in my version, you only see Jesus lying there. That cover, together with the reality forced upon us, made me realize that I had to publish this book—it became, for me, a kind of testimony to landscapes that have changed.

The physicality of the book really does feel a bit like a guidebook.

I wanted the book to feel like old school textbooks, from which I also took the abstract landscape diagrams at the end, and to have the quality of Xerox print. Toward the end, I debated whether to make the cover thicker, more “fine,” as the investment in the book kept growing. But the soft cover was a decision I had made from the outset, and I’m glad I didn’t give in to changing it. The proportions and flexibility of the book allow you to sit and read it—it’s not just an image album, and it was important to me that it not feel luxurious. It has no dust jacket, and it is only in Hebrew—partly because of its texts. The text by Oded Wolkstein plays with language, and the text by Yair Garbuz is full of quotations from songs so deeply tied to this place and to our language, like the landscapes themselves, that translating it would betray its essence.

Thank you, Talia! Which book would you invite to the magazine?

I heard that Shay Zilberman has produced a new one-off edition in France. Interesting!