Beverly Barkat

Paintings
Venue: N&N Aman Gallery, Tel Aviv
Curator: Naomi Aviv
Dates: February 15th – March 15th, 2013

Whatever Is Present Is Utterly and Urgently Present

“Beverly Barkat’s series of large charcoal paintings, merging strong lines with anthropomorphic forms, does not immediately disclose the rich interrelations between body and landscape. An ideal point of view from which to observe these studious paintings, offering a classical synthesis between the figurative and the abstract, would be from the top of a ladder, while the paintings are spread out on the floor, lit by a fixed light from a bi-polar source. North and south. She herself seems to paint her tender, dense and powerful gestures while alternately bending over the floor and climbing up a ladder. It is this play of perspectives that endows the paintings with intense yet airy transitions, with a loaded and diligent relationship between sensual-intimate-erotic touches, and an architectonic approach rich with intercrossing lines: here is a forest of thin tree-stumps, stretching diagonally like masts, strewn with sculpted human bodies and oval head shapes. Here are sharp lines, arteries, veins and capillaries that seem to carve their way through rocks and bifurcate into the ground, then struggle to grow upwards again, towards the light and the air.”

Naomi Aviv, Curator
February 2011