| Yehudit Sasportas works with traces of missing matter, with ghosts and shadows, both as personal and collective substance, and as a political metaphor. From William Shakespeare to Caspar David Friedrich to Andrei Tarkovsky, the landscape has had a mental function, serving as a projection, or as an expression of trauma and anxiety. In recent years, part of the images in Sasportas’ works has dealt with images of landscapes: treetops, clearings, caves and swamps. The landscape functions as an emotional and mental platform of exposure on which loneliness is a subconscious driving force. The territory is metaphoric. The drawing, linked to the landscape, undergoes a twofold defamiliarization, resulting in hybrid collages, which expose an extant rift. |  |
Yehoshua Simon
Yehudit Sasportas works with traces of missing matter, with ghosts and shadows, both as personal and collective substance, and as a political metaphor. From William Shakespeare to Caspar David Friedrich to Andrei Tarkovsky, the landscape has had a mental function, serving as a projection, or as an expression of trauma and anxiety. In recent years, part of the images in Sasportas’ works has dealt with images of landscapes: treetops, clearings, caves and swamps. The landscape functions as an emotional and mental platform of exposure on which loneliness is a subconscious driving force. The territory is metaphoric. The drawing, linked to the landscape, undergoes a twofold defamiliarization, resulting in hybrid collages, which expose an extant rift. Against an arising sense of fragmentation, the musical motive creates a narrative. The landscape and its open navel, like a clearing or a swamp, form the area of an open wound. Sasportas’ images tend toward the realm of black and white. The latest among them opens up onto a drawing in which breakdown, wounding, explosion and rift are being depicted through a direct bodily drawing act tangled in a mechanical drawing operation of frozen imprinting/minting/stamping. Sasportas’ work in the range of black and white is a work with spaces both visible and non-visible, a work of depicting images as drawings out of a negative space, and a work by means of a process in the studio resembling a photograph’s negative. It is a work which uses memory while imprinting light.
Sasportas’ works can be seen as three-dimensional mental maps where biographical and mental elements are processed into the realm of the visual. Like looking at files of sound recordings, or listening to photographic files, the processed pieces of information turn into formal matter. In Sasportas’ transition from installations of sculpted drawings to installations of projected drawings, the space as a whole becomes sculpted, the viewer being surrounded by film projections. The whole gallery becomes a drawing in motion. The territory of the drawing in motion becomes a magnetized swamp; the images in the drawings look like imprints or still-fresh scars.
