We all have our ways of dealing with trauma. And God knows there is plenty of that going around. Tal Mazliach certainly knows how to express her emotional baggage and has been doing so, in her own singular, colorful way, for some years now.
The 63-year-old multi-award-winning painter’s current show, War Decorations 23-24, curated by Amit Shemma, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art conveys the maelstrom of feelings and thoughts that engulfed her on October 7, 2023.
On that fateful day, Mazliach was at home in Kfar Aza, where she was born and grew up and, other than a 26-year hiatus in Tel Aviv, has lived her whole life. When the sirens began wailing, and the WhatsApp messages started careening across the kibbutz’s social media system, Mazliach holed up in her safe room, which also serves as her studio.
For over 20 hours, she was incarcerated there, unable to leave, afraid of making a sound but able to hear the harrowing developments transpiring on the other side of the outside wall of the room.
Art has acted as a palliative release for Mazliach for most of her life and, once again, came to her psychological and terror-processing aid as soon as she was able to resume her creative endeavor while staying with relatives after eventually being rescued by a special IDF unit.
Mazliach generally opts for a highly colorful painting vernacular, but, even by her standards, in War Decorations she has clearly gone for broke. The around 30 works, tightly packed around the museum display space, are unsurprisingly intense in the extreme.
That goes for the wildly polychromic palette she employs and the dense compositions with barely a millimeter of breathing space left unfilled, as is often the case with Mazliach’s work. However, for this outing, circumstances demanded a change of gear as she was unable to obtain oils and had to make do with acrylic.
The physical substratum is also different – canvas instead of wood. “Acrylic is more liquid, and eventually Tal returns to using oil on wood and gets back to the layering she identifies with,” Shemma explains.
Unavoidable material substance switch notwithstanding, there is no missing her trademark no-nonsense style. Fueled by the horrors she heard and endured in isolation for so long, the feelings and images she sensed and later saw on news reports flooded her consciousness and, subsequently, her paintings.
Her art shoots from the hip
War Decorations 1, which opens the series, finds Mazliach shooting from the hip – almost literally. There are numerous blue pistol shapes in clear view, and, as you examine the color-saturated canvas more closely, you make out the words, in Hebrew, “I Got Out Alive.”
It does not leave an awful lot to the imagination. Walking around the Mazliach show stirs the soul. The vast majority of the paintings are not large, and you have to peer at them from close quarters to discern all the manifold details. This naturally draws you into the vortex of emotions that cascaded out of Mazliach onto the canvases and, later, the wooden anchor of her paintings as she processed them.
“This exhibition is a very concentrated capsule,” Shemma notes. “Tal has engaged in decorations throughout her career – decorations of religious holidays, such as the decorations people hang up in their Sukkah.” That, of course, is temporally relevant to the Hamas attack.
The translation of the show header also works a treat. “Decorations” in the titular context references both the artist’s line of aesthetic attack as well as military medals and citations. There is more than a soupçon of irony in there, inferring the ribbons and medals that Mazliach feels the military aristocracy award to each other.
Some of the figures in the exhibits are also of questionable gender identity, while others have scarred flesh. The artist has had her fair share of dermatological issues over the years so that also fits the bill.
The textual elements are core to the messages and senses that the artist is looking to impart, while the words she paints in the works include dark humor.
Phrases such as ‘Good morning everyone, it’s gonna be a lovely day; some rockets will fly” spell that out in no uncertain terms. But she also describes her predicament exactly as she felt and heard it at the time.
Another cites a neighbor’s bodily emissions and jokes about the ensuing aroma but not being able to open a window while the terrorists carried out their demonic work. Other paintings portray more plainly-put descriptions of the state of affairs 15 months ago.
Mazliach, a heavy smoker even when she is not in mortal danger, says that her time in her security room “passed with 60 cigarettes,” which, I was informed, was some way below her regular daily tobacco consumption.
Mazliach does not pull her punches in her art, and coming across a figure in War Decorations 24, with the middle finger of each hand raised to an invisible foe – presumably the Palestinian terrorists – with Allah Akbar (God is great, in Arabic) daubed across the canvas numerous times, is no surprise.
The colors she chooses and combines are inviting, on occasion even bordering on jolly, drawing you into the aesthetic milieu before you realize exactly what it is you’re scrutinizing from up close. Phallic symbols and references to military violence, and the phrase “I blame you,” are also proffered.
“Tal always does that,” Shemma comments. “She takes on very challenging topics, not just October 7. That started a lot earlier. She has also addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And she employs all these colors, a sort of caricature, [and] comic style.”
Although this almost suggests an insouciant approach, the curator is having none of that. “Yes, it seems to be simple but you could never call Tal naïve. There is something a little misleading about this character, Tal Mazliach.”
It may be hard to get to grips with the artist’s personal makeup, but she generally provides her viewers with clear pointers as regards her creative intent. Her paintings may sport an Israeli or Palestinian flag, rocket shapes, heavy army boots presumably about to trample someone, someone fleeing, or a rifle pointed in a specific and threatening direction.
Africa also crops up, in figures and chromic combinations. Shemma says this comes from street-level cred.
“She lived in south Tel Aviv for many years [where she encountered refugees from Sudan and elsewhere]. She is left wing [and] a peace activist, which leads her in the direction of all kinds of struggles. That, and the fact that she was born and still lives in Kfar Aza [so close to Gaza and the Palestinians], that is what encapsulates her work.”
That can make for an oxymoronic viewing experience that may veer from enticement to shock and much in between. There is ne’er a dull moment with Tal Mazliach.
For more information: https://www.tamuseum.org.il/en/