EMERGING FROM THE PANDEMONIUM
The initial reaction is one of astonishment. Huge canvases with black as the dominant color. Every sort of gradation in black. The white areas push the black even further in the direction of gloom. Or so it seems.

This gloom quickly proves to be an undeserved interpretation. Tamar Rozenblat paints woods. Trunks, actually, rather than trees. The perspective is from below or from eye level. Although branches can sometimes still be seen, generally they are rows of trunks. As pillars, as columns, as buttresses of space. A space that still has space to spare. It gradually dawns on me that this is portraying a counterbalance to the pandemonium of life on the street, perhaps to everyday life, too. Nature is not gloomy, nature is mostly tranquil. The silence is not unpleasant, you can hear the silence, experience it. Like at a classical concert. Rozenblat appears to symbolize this by painting abstracted sound waves. Sometimes visibly emerging from a horn, in other cases lying over the picture like a web.

Nor is nature dull. In one painting she illustrates this with animal images on tree trunks, like an invitational sign. The message seems to be, if they feel comfortable with this, why shouldn’t we? In the other paintings this notion is substantiated by the way Rozenblat paints. Only after she has spread acrylic paste on the canvas using her hands does she go to work with a brush. The tracks made by her fingers remain visible. This method gives the paintings a large degree of liveliness and thus vitality. This tactile skin also invites one to touch it. Providing an initial impulse to (symbolically) enter?

Rozenblat makes photographs as well as paintings. She bases these on the same principle. Their grayness and blackness appear at first sight to be gloomy and dull. On further inspection they are spatial compositions that confer an unexpected status on their origins, mostly multi story car parks. By drawing the viewer’s attention to the details, she manages to turn the empty concrete spaces into settings for the viewer’s own fantasies. She offers an invitation, not rejection. The viewer can make the invisible visible for himself.

Tamar Rozenblat (1966) has a French father and a Hungarian mother. She was born in Israel and has lived in the Netherlands for thirty years. Although an artist for all that time, she was in her forties before she first went to Art Academy. She graduated last year. The works she is producing now can therefore be seen as the start of a second career. She describes her new works as stages in an investigation. A somewhat self-effacing description. Her hesitation to give the works a title reveals this investigative nature. She wants to keep them open to interpretation. A title might block this avenue and so rob the viewer of his freedom. This is not what she wants. What she wants is to take him along on her quest for salutary silence.

Rob Perrée

Amsterdam, March 2014.

The Beauty of Dark Places
Text: Ronit Eden

“If you have never seen the horizon, you do not know that there is a limit to your vision. In the dense forests around Kumasi, you cannot see further than a few metres ahead. If you tell something like that to a Dutchman, it upsets him. He wants to oversee the situation and see where he is going. If he doesn’t have a clear view, he feels trapped.

But the opposite is true. Instead of discouraging him from finding an even denser one behind every bush, it makes him want to look further. You carve out a path as fast as you can in order to see what lies beyond. the knife sharpens the eye, for the more limited your sight, the greater the will to see”

A walk into the dark forest has served many artists as a metaphor for the subconscious, for fears or unknown dangers, a symbol of all that is wild and un-tamable. The quote was taken from Arthur Japin’s novel De zwarte met witte hart, which describes the affinity between people and the natural setting in which they were raised, drawing a direct line between the landscape and one’s personal, cultural, and social conduct. Japin uses the story of the forest to indicate the great difference between two cultures: the culture in which Kwasi (the book’s protagonist) was born in Gold Coast in Africa, and that of the Netherlands to which he was forced to move as a child. Kwasi stands for the feeling one has, when he enters deeper into the woods: the deeper you go, the closer you draw to your true self. You are completely exposed to your fears. The silence of the forest conceals surprises, but at the same time it sharpens your self- consciousness and concentration. This is the beauty of Dark Places

Tamar Rozenblat touches upon this point of being totally exposed in the depths of the forest, and the beauty inborn to this dark place. However, it is not an easy choice if you choose to follow the silence in the depths of the wood. It may look simple from afar, but as you draw nearer, it turns out to be more complicated.

Take, for example, the painting Thought. From a distance, it looks like a dense fabric of lines. As you approach, you notice a thicket through which you can reach into a virginal wild forest. If you manage to get in, you will find yourself surrounded by thick trees, intersecting branches partly hanging in mid-air in such density that the sunlight cannot penetrate. Cobwebs stretched on the leaves create a grid which unifies everything into a single tangle. You have to decide where to turn. No one has paved a road and only you can decide where to advance. You must find your place at the heart of the woods.

Tamar has been painting forests for three years now, and some of these works you can see here today. This practice stemmed from a search which was not only thematic, but also formal. In the past she created sculptures and three-dimensional objects which had to be surrounded to be experienced. In this series she offers a contrasted experience. It is the forest that surrounds those visiting it, both as a metaphor and in real life.

The viewer is invited to face a painting of a forest, to enter it until the trees embrace you, and seek your way into its depths, until you finds peace.

As Japin says in the book “Some landscapes elicit thoughts, some cover emotions.” Tamat’s forests belong to the first kind.

This series of works was created after the series of works on silence. By listening, we can connect to one another and to the world. In the beginning there was the word… it is also so wondrous to realise that the ear is so reminiscent of an embryo and when we let those ears mirror each other, the concept of we are created in his own image comes to life. While creating and reflecting, the concepts and images came to me.

In this series of works, I explore the female energy and its meanings, in our world and in a sense also in our evolution.

Would the recognition and the right appreciation of the feminine energy will lead to a solution of many of the problems that the world/humanity is facing?

I do believe so…

These are the titles of works that I realised between 2019-2020. The shoe, which appears several times in my works, covers a number of concepts. I prefer not to reveal all my ideas that are associated with the shoe motif; I like to let the viewers come up with their own interpretations. With this writing i give the direction to the idea behind it. It’s a contemporary shoe where for me also the design/lines express several concepts that i communicate with, among others connectedness and evolution.

The series has started with how we lay our feet down in the world, our intentions.

The hands and feet are inseparable elements of the subject and for me they emphasised a more emotional aspect of the story.

The process of making and thinking about the series is a form of research. I can say that “Dissolving in space” came about after trying to figure out “As we touch the ground”, they are not separate. I always experience the idea of “Dissolving in space” as being connected, letting go of one material form and yet being there in it all.

As we touch the ground; Dissolving in space

The beauty of sensory ecology
Sensory ecology is a discipline that focuses on how living creatures use information to survive, but not to live. By trans-defining the orthodox concept of sensory ecology, a serious heterodox question arises: how do organisms use their senses to live, i.e. to enjoy or suffer life? To respond to such a query the objective (time-independent) and emotional (non-rational) meaning of symbols must be revealed. Our program is distinct from both the neo-Darwinian and the classical ecological perspective because it does not focus on survival values of phenotypes and their functions, but asks for the aesthetic effect of biological structures and their symbolism. Our message recognizes that sensing apart from having a survival value also has a beauty value. Thus, we offer a provoking and inspiring new view on the sensory relations of ‘living things’ and their surroundings, where the innovating power of feelings have more weight than the privative power of reason.

This is a series of works that was born, in part, after seeing a film about the effects of a medicinal plant called the ayahuasca. In the film, it was shown how, after taking the plant in a form of a drink, which was prepared in a ritual, people came to similar visions/dreams. This led me to the notion that these visions and dreams were already hidden within the plant. The plant as healer, through the dreams that live within it. In this series of works I try to capture those dreams. In several series of works that I have realized in recent years, I want to address and ideally stimulate/energize our connection with the natural world. I strive that we would reconnect with the natural world that in ways also lives within us. These issues touch on the condition of humans and ecology. The series “Tincture of Dreams” is a result of a series I have called the “Ecology of Beauty”, where I am exploring how we relate to beauty, which for me is not separate from the natural world.

The natural world between dream and reality
Some thoughts and ideas also formulated by others that engage me in my works.

As i’m being seduced and touched by the natural world, i transform my experience into images…

“The living world holds answers for us to create a more resilient, regenerative, and beautiful world. It is time to quiet our cleverness, to observe and listen deeply, and reconnect to nature’s wisdom by asking,

When we Ask Nature, first we quiet our human cleverness.

Then we ask, and then we listen.

The answer is the echo that bounces off of the land herself.

With the solution in hand, we always end the circle by saying thank you”

-Janine Benyus

Geometry in nature

“The wisest and most noble teacher is nature itself”

—Leonardo da Vinci

How to ingang Magic in the every day

Dancing  into the present  moment

Birds spitch

The edge of the present

– working with light to transform my dreams

to pass on my dreams (plants talk)…

• visual expression for a transcendent, spiritual reality beyond the observable world.
• Can a painting invite me into another dimension?
• Spiritual healing dream/plants = healer…

• – How to express the unseen presence in my work ….