Untitled 1, 2012
oil on canvas and collage, 30x30 cm  

Untitled 3, 2010
oil on canvas, 60x60 cm  

Untitled 5, 2010
oil on canvas, 50x50 cm  

Untitled 6, 2011
oil on canvas, 90x90 cm  

Untitled 7, 2010
oil on canvas, 60x60 cm  

Untitled 8, 2010
oil on canvas, 60x60 cm  

Untitled 11, 2012
oil and pencil on canvas and collage, 40x40 cm  

Untitled 12, 2010
oil on canvas, 60x60 cm  

Untitled 13, 2012
oil on canvas, 50x50 cm  

Weightless Coat

Tamar Toledano Pe'er

Yearning for home, home as a metaphor—not the roof and walls of a house, but the sense of warmth and security. The "suitcase feel," I have called it, the one you don’t unpack, because you are going to move on soon.

I felt that I must start over in a new place, with a tabula rasa.

Well-versed in moving, I decided to contemplate house and place moves. For me, it has to do with doubt and indecision as a way of life, constant doubtfulness… wandering and searching. Leaving one house for another, elsewhere. I am not alone in this process; there are always casualties along the way, lightly wounded.

In the last move, from the moshav to Tel Aviv, the anonymity furnished by the new place, in the other house, helped me put some order, put things in place, and this feeling was a source of inspiration for the current series.

I outlined squares, stretched a criss-cross set of lines, mixed ideas, pixels of a camouflage net, as a hideout, a quiet hiding place. All these provided me, in the painting, with a safety net to introduce order, a weightless coat, supporting and non-oppressive, like a cipher, a code, data blurring, under whose guise I may arrange my life without struggles and without decisions. A respite from the bustle.

It all happened in silent acceptance. A well-earned rest. More solid figures gradually penetrated the lines, and life was pushed back to its track, because this is how life is: rhythmically and dynamically, it returned from an imposed leave, a needed vacation.

Densely squeezed pixels—everything is clear; broadly interspersed pixels—everything is vague and blurred.

What a pleasure, to experience such great chaos within me and yet paint with such exemplary order, as it were, in such hues.

The plan is not always clear-cut in advance. At times, the work is retroactive and associative, and the painting, like the writing, facilitates clarification.