A Thousand Nights

Shade Twafra

                                      Black milk of dawn we drink it in the evening (Paul Celan, Death Fugue)

Shade Twafra paints with charcoal, tar, coffee and tea, mud, insulating material, acrylic and ink, with the sun. He paints in the morning and in the evening. He paints a lot in black and little in color. A lot of color. He draws oversized characters that have enlarged limbs. He draws a man, a girl, a horse, a bird. He paints with broad and quick movements on a stained canvas that smells of charcoal from the campfire, of a cup of coffee, of a stain of tar.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger stated that language speaks. It is not the person who speaks the language, but the language that precedes the person. It dictates the person’s lexicon of words, the syntactical pattern, what is distinguished and what has no words and is therefore gone. For Shade, the material speaks. Material precedes language. It is the sound of a unique being at the moment of eruption.

Twafra, resident of the town of Ma’ar, speaks through material. Sometimes loudly, with a lot of material on a large canvas, and sometimes quietly, with a brush on a ceramic tile. His works are powerful. Similar to neo-expressionist artists, his brush movement is wild, his forms are primal and symbolic, his paintings are packed. Figures and images are compressed into the underlying material, sometimes barely, sometimes rolling inside each other, mixing animal, human and inanimate.

Like the story of Scheherazade, who weaves a story for a thousand nights in the hopes of saving her life, Twafra paints fairy tales that spin the thread of his life. For someone who spent most of his childhood in hospitals, painting is air, water, fire and earth. He paints at night. He hangs the painting to dry outside, and finds it again at sunrise. Like the story that twists, doubles, and continues without a break, Twafra creates darkness and light, goes from day to night and from night to day, from one fragment to another, from one motif to the next. This is his anti-death fugue, a song of life rolling again and again in primal materials. It is the earth of coffee and mud, the water of dipping the canvas in tea, the black foam air and the fire of coal.

Curator: Tal Frenkel Alroy