The paintings by Sharon Etgar focus on a specific place, a private and intimate place with borders that are formed and shaped relative to the space of the surrounding room. A room is the place of gathering; a minuscule world set apart in seclusion, but also, existing parallel to the external world, the room serves as a laboratory to examine that which is outside. The colors are the platform of the worlds. Delving into color tones and the focus on colors, as the building blocks and matter of a painting’s reality, lead Sharon to new insights and a deeper comprehension of this reality. The careful observation translates into a colorful and formative relationship between pigments that simultaneously seem both condensed and simplistic in their layout.
The painting here strives for pure observation of the world; however the translation of this observation when introduced to the private world, the private palette, to the reorganization of matter with a degree of loyalty that is less than an accurate mirror image of reality, leads to a creation that differs from that of a realistic painting. The latter is more obligated in its translation to what it determines to be the parallel reality and is subject to the severe rigidity of what the painter determines as not-me.
The dimension of depth of her work is strengthened by the conscious and purposeful dialog that she leads with the tradition towards which she leans. The powerfulness of first impressions from meetings with artists such as Eduard Vuillard, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gwen John is a constant echo in her emergence as an independent painter, and on her path to creating a personal colorful index. Sharon Etgar’s painting is characterized by this array of factors which she is capable of introducing to the canvas and in her ability to process them in her palette to an extraordinary degree of depth.
Menachem Lorberbaum |
