Graciela Shalev 2007
THE UNIVERSE AND ME ... ONE

• 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