Graciela Shalev: Comments

One of my deepest pleasures , while observing my work through time, is the recognition of my needs, spiritual changes, evolvement and the affirmation of my belief system in each one of my different periods.
As it usually occurs, no change takes place at the blink of an eye, and mine, from the professional point of view, took place progressively, while succeding in the correlation between what my soul felt and imagined and the images created on the canvas.
I express myself almost always through the human figure, and all the rest is accesory; they are simply tools used to respect the universal laws of plastic expression, established through out the times, which allows me to end up with a successfully finished piece of art.
As I often manifest about my work, I keep affirming that to grow, to mature, to go deep into my search, brought and keeps awaken my need for searching the essential, and my consent in getting rid of the superfluous, the temporal, to finally find that inexorable and eternal connection between the animated and the inanimated world.
This exhibition was a great challenge, a quantum leap in how i expressed myself.
What was conceived as we ourselves are conceived, from the infinitesimal, through small size works, as if i wouldn't dare to design in big dimmensions, today screams into my being to expand.
And i am doing so with great reverence toward my own spiritual growth, with the certainty that my quantum leap speaks for everybody.
I speak through my hands immersed into the collective conscioussness and i grow with it, and it growths through my collaboration.
Many big artists and great creators succeded already in this point.
But the growing experience is so personal that i submerge myself into it as the most important discovery of my life: to discover myself while observing , asking, analizing and eliminating the innecessary.
And that is the goal of this exhibition : the simplicity of the volumes , fussing themselves one with each other, by using the line in all its majesty, sugestive, very precise somethimes and imprecised others, when it gets disolved into the volume.
I paint when i write, but i write when i paint also, and my works sing at the rythm of the universe and at the individual rythm of all the observers, since my rythm is not mine, is ours...because we are all one.

Graciela Shalev
june 2007

Graciela Shalev is born in Buenos Aires, Argentina , where she graduates from the School of Fine Arts " Manuel Belgrano".
After that she continues to study painting with Naum Goijman, sculpture with Leo Vinci, and gravure with Aida Carvallo.
She establishes herself in the city of Miami, USA, in 1990, where she continues developping her career and exhibiting her works all over the world .
For Graciela Shalev it is essential the way in which she communicates with the world through the plastic languaje. Thus, lines, volumes and colors, together with the writen words, become her special way to transmit her spiritual growth in constant movement.
She starts her works with her mind on the human figure that undergoes a process of elimination of details to get to a synthesis where the accent is the composition.
Large brush strokes cover the surface of the canvas, leading to a reading of her work through the use of color in high saturation degrees.
For the artist " the languaje of the soul and the individual experiences of each human being conform her own universe.
The need of the internal search, of the essential, is her most important goal becoming the real objective of this series of paintings. That is the reason that brings her to cleanse her works , eliminating all signs of the innecessary or superfluous.
Her paintings are the result of a work in constant progress that shows and intense interior experience that serves as an act of communication with the others.

Silvia Marrube.
Museo de Artes Plásticas “Eduardo Sívori”