press & critique

Tali Farchi – vd Wouden

Plants & Plenty

Curator: Daniella Talmor

Tali Farchi has been living and creating in The Netherlands for over 20 years. The series she has created of late "Plants & Plenty" exhibited at Beit Chagall in Haifa, the city of her birth and where she was educated. The colour green, the odours of the Carmel Mountains and the Israeli sunlight are evident in her works through the years.

During the Covid Pandemic the artist searched for subjects near to her physically, she began painting the rooms of her three daughters, where the plants and the bookshelves filled with stories take a dominant place. Zoom also played a significant role as friends modelled for her through the camera. Once the pandemic subsided in Holland, the artist got out of her studio, painting in other people's houses as well as in popular book stores. The tones of green and yellow created in her studio or in nature itself, are dominant in her paintings. The interior of the rooms, still life, bookshelves and human figures alongside flourishing greenery using liberal and wide brushstrokes searching for the shapes and shades evident in the spaces between the leaves.

Over the years the artists has painted movement, catching the moment in quick freehand sketches as well as in multimedia performance in which she conducts a dialogue between dance and painting, between music and play – moments of colour and motion.

In Farhi's studio her ideas come to life, through colour, inspiration and atmosphere. They come to life portraying elements of the artist's life, with shapes and associations emerging from the art the painting. In this manner a variation of spectacular images take shape on the canvas in a rich spectrum of colours. The new reality being created in these works gives freedom to the various shapes while still keeping with her distinctive style of her works and serve as an instrument of personal and autonomous expression.

Farhi's works create a beauty bustling with life. They astound the viewer but simultaneously endeavour to awaken an aesthetic joy. The artist creates a musical score inviting the viewer to wander around the surface of the painting, in the harmony of the matching colours alongside the disharmony of contrasting colours. The surface of the painting becomes a stage of activity on which blotches of colour and brushstrokes play a game of direction, thickness and shape. The blotches and lines wrestle on this stage, pulling and pushing, defining acceptance or rejection and creating a harmonious or disharmonious relationship between them, a dynamic hierarchy and an ever changing balance of power.

Plants & Plenty is a series of paintings presenting still life in all its richness, in which books and plants each tell their story. The series is still evolving to date. The artist explains that in her opinion the plants are the visual and the plenty is the obscure joy in which each viewer can find his own individual happiness.

Tali Farhi's paintings focus on interiors and on specific scenic views and meander amidst picturesque abstract happenings. The paintings portray a philosophical life which is evident through individual perspective and from within this philosophy the artist endeavours to create a landscape of longing on the canvas, again and again in each and every painting. Consequently, each painting aspires to give a plastic expression to feelings and experiences accumulated by the artist over the years.

Daniella Talmor, January 2023


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Art critique by Avi Vinogard

The art show of Artist Tali Farchi - van der Wouden

“The canvases of the excellent artist Tali Farchi, seem windows that bring the beauty of bright nature into the exhibition space, at the Artist House in Tel Aviv, It's illuminate their surroundings and as if summoning the summer heat that caresses the viewer.

Farchi, who lives in the Netherlands, avoids painting the sky above her. Gray skies, patched with dramatic cloud appearances most of the year. Those skies that were the inspiration for the works of the Dutch masters from the golden age of painting who thus overcame the calm and peaceful Dutch landscape.

In contrast, Farchi prefers to characterize its landscapes in a cloudless blue sky and in direct sunlight that creates deep shadows on the ground.

Thus, the artist creates a tension between the serene landscapes and the stable and well-balanced compositions and the dynamic shadows that intertwine on the ground. Weaves textures full of movement and interest that reflect the trees towering around.

All these combined with the artist's great brushstrokes, load her landscapes in a dynamic and fascinating atmosphere. Dark shadows play a major role in many of her works and at times they seem even more tangible than the objects themselves.

In this way Farchi forms the landscape pastoralism and makes it a one-time expression of her inner world.Despite the meticulous composition, her works seem like a random slice in the landscape.

The origin of the trees, fields, and dirt paths that inhabit the paintings belong to every place and nowhere at the same time.They are universal in nature.

Under her sensitive brush they become personal pieces of nature saturated with emotion and dramatic atmosphere and make Tali Farchi's works so unique”.


Avi Vinogard

Cultural researcher And curator