Talk to me in the language of absence Yehuda Amichai
I know what it means to follow a trace, to pander to a shadow, and to use memory in such a way that everything you desire can exist. It is like a journey, you say, and you even find a map, outline a route, and pursue a destination. That is one way to say it. But you also know that the trace, the shadow, the thing you desire, and which thus exists, needs you to be the route, needs to become a destination in you. Lihie Talmor and her daughter Ruti, together, undertake such a journey. The shadow—the trace—is Elvis: not the icon, not his biographical contour, not even his mythology. There is something more fleeting which took place and is taking place here, in this book, if we see it and read it and let it travel within ourselves. Ría is not a travel book wherein someone recounts experiences, records meaningful moments, assembles memories, and illustrates them with formally and technically splendid original photographs, although all this is part of it. There is something else, however. Like an arm of the sea, Ría penetrates a territory wherein the origin and absence of this figure, this blast that was Elvis, are confused. The text and images form the banks of the same stream, which flows while hauling residue, following a trace and looking for a face. It is what Kafka sought every time he tried to find it: “I was not describing people. I was telling a story. They are images, only images.” 1 Kafka called him K. Sometimes he has no name. Here he is called Elvis… “there was something unreachable, ungraspable, about him that we wanted to understand.” It is impossible to describe more accurately and plainly what Ría conveys to us. These words, copied from Ruti’s text, pinpoint what I wish to emphasize: images aimed toward a presence which from the onset is acknowledged as unreachable, ungraspable.
María Fernanda Palacios
Caracas 2022
Talk to me in the language of absence
In recent years, the work of Lihie Talmor has been like a progressive conquest of artistic space: from the two-dimensional plane of the etched page, with its illusionary spaces
Is it necessary to have the proper distance so as to see the full picture? And how does one know what the proper distance is?
In recent years, the work of Lihie Talmor has been like a progressive conquest of artistic space: from the two-dimensional plane of the etched page, with its illusionary spaces
Is it necessary to have the proper distance so as to see the full picture? And how does one know what the proper distance is?
It is not difficult to see in Lihie Talmor's work the expression of a sensitivity in its utmost development, that the artist knows how to communicate assertively
There exist an overriding need to distinguish between the ephemeral and the essential; the ephemeral wounds, the essential yet endures; until the day when the ephemeral will have corroded the essential, will have destroyed its very nucleus, its hard nucleus…
In a country where oblivion is who gathers the remains of the city, where the blanks of collective memory decide about the changes in power and the markets, the work of LIHIE TALMOR functions as a film of the subversive unconscious.
