The three-dimensional objects that Yael Efrati creates from various materials (including building materials) can be described as sculptural renditions of photographic views. In Rodica, Efrati painstakingly recreates the appearance of diagonal bands of shadow and light, of the sort cast by sunlight through a shutter blind, on the frame and glazing of a picture. To this end, she inlays light and dark types of wood to represent beams of light falling on a frame, and uses specially treated screenprint to extend the same bands onto the picture’s glazing.
The work tells the story of a reproduction of a painting that used to hang on a wall of Efrati’s grandparents’ apartment in Haifa, where over time it gradually faded in the fierce light of the Israeli sun (the effects of light clearly mirrors – in reverse – the effects of light on photographic paper). The print is question, of the painting Country Girl with a Spindle painted by Nicolae Grigorecu (the “national painter” of Romania), had been brought from Romania by the grandparents during their visit their country of birth in the 1990s. 

After it had faded, the turned to a close friend to make an old painting reproduction of it. By presenting a photograph of the painting that was made of the faded reproduction of the painting, Efrati is continuing the sequence of conversion initiated by her predecessors. In this waym she is adding another genealogical link through a conceptual and material creative act, which had begun in her family home unwittingly. Her decision t photograph a painting os a faded photograph of that painting form Romania involved a special reference to the object’s domestic setting, which is indicated by the bands of light and shadow cast by the shutters. This simulated household object encapsulates a very specific architectural setting (the precise pattern of light and shadow cast by the shutters) and the historical timeline of the work’s transition from one home and homeland to another, through a series of transpositions and replications that bring to mind the travels of the ship Argo in Greek mythology.

Aya Meron