Yaal Herman photography
My work deals with language, or more accurately—with the translation of language; the ability to introduce something abstract, such as a word, into a pattern of order and meaning, much like the ability to produce an art object in the world. I translate the reality in front of me into a painterly language. Processes of abstraction, subtraction, and refinement of form occur in the act of translation, alongside processes of distortion or addition, which alter and expand meaning.
It may be said that my primary concern is the human condition. In retrospect, over the years I have touched on a sequence of topics where one led to another, in correspondence with the genesis narrative of the six days of creation. Whether consciously or not, a personal discourse was spun, from chaos to horizon, from horizon to flora, from flora to light, from light to fauna, and from fauna to man. Man as body, the body as matter, the political other, man as animal, the affinities between man and nature, and so forth. All of these provide me with a platform for existential inquiry, as each body of work is a chance to study dozens of drawings and paintings, which sometimes spawn painterly environments, giving rise to a painting installation. A dialogue is thus created, in constant correspondence with art traditions, between the work of art and the world, which is woven into a string whose roots are age-old.