In 2014, Sharon Poliakine (b. 1964, Haifa; lives and works in Tel Aviv) encountered the rock engravings in the prehistoric cave Les Combarelles in France. These engravings, some 600 images dating to 12,000–10,000 BCE, were discovered in 1901, and include mostly identifiable figures of animals, but also several dozen anthropomorphic images. One of the schematic, quasi-human figures engraved on the cave's wall was a small head, a prehistoric smiley of sorts. The little smiley recurs in all the works in Poliakine's new cluster as a "wink" from the distant past, from the dawn of humanity. The rock engravings, carved into the cave walls, one above the other, over some two thousand years, created a super-imposition—a complex effect created by overlapping and merging images dating to different periods, which can serve as a guide to Poliakine's painterly practice.
The rock engravings in Les Combarelles join an archive of images, which has been accumulating for two decades, and is used by Poliakine in her works. It spans two types of sources. One is readymade elements associated primarily with printmaking techniques, especially etching—a medium that serves as a technical-conceptual anchor and a point of departure for her painterly practice. In addition to the Les Combarelles engravings, this type includes motifs from ancient maps, the image of the Queen of Cyclamens, which appears on a 15th-century playing card, and the figure of a female printer, who is actually a male printer, extracted from the first technical instruction book on engraving and etching from the mid- 17th century.
A second type of imagery originates in drawing from observation of still life. It includes ink drawings of plants—mainly cyclamen, gladioli, and castor, and of objects created by the artist, but also reproductions of masterpieces, which Poliakine treats as still life, and draws from observation in her own handwriting: Venus after Diego Velázquez's The Rokeby Venus (1647–51), The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) after Théodore Géricault, The School of Athens (1509–11) after Raphael, and more recently also hunting scenes (1615–16) after Peter Paul Rubens.
With this image archive, Poliakine creates superimpositions of painstaking drawing with a brush and oil paints. These are superimposed on and intertwined within an abstract painterly space which obeys a painterly logic of bodily gestures, very different from that of drawing. Some of the paintings, including Escalation and No Image, were painted during the last fighting period (Operation Guardian of the Walls, May 2021) and against the backdrop of the rising tension and violence that flared up between Jews and Arabs within Israel. In Escalation, a drawing on the upper section of the canvas—which contains, among other things, fragments from Rubens's The Wolf and Fox Hunt—is gradually blocked by a painted area devoid of an image. In the center of the bottom part of the canvas, Poliakine has drawn a small scale bar, indicating that every inch in her painting corresponds with 2.3 cm in Rubens's painting. "In the atmosphere of general escalation and the great mess that our small country is making," says Poliakine, "something in our scale has gone completely awry. We have lost compassion, we have lost all sense of proportion."1
In No Image, Poliakine explores the possibility of a drawing which does not add up to form a distinct image, a drawing that is not armed with an image. The superimposed motif fragments generated an interference, a moiré pattern. In printmaking as well as on electronic screens, moiré is usually an unwanted optical effect of leakage, resulting from the crossing of two sets of lines. For Poliakine, the leaking expands the idea of superimposition to an extreme state in which the differentiated object dissipates.
Hiding, blurring, nullification, and erasure play a key role in Poliakine's work. They serve the theme, the composition, the construction of the image, but they are also an integral part of the invisible history of each of her canvases. Circles and Cyclamens, for example, was initially painted on a previous painting, entitled Middle East (2018). The triptych Landscape on Landscape likewise covers a work from 2007 called Flag, which was based on a journalistic photograph featuring a group of Palestinian children running on hills, the last one carrying the Palestinian flag in his hand. The hand drawing at the bottom of the left panel is the only one that also existed in the previous version of the painting. The (left) hand was returned to the surface, while the rest of the area has been occupied by a new landscape.
The enigmatic, crowded painting, Where are the Muses?, is a kind of self-portrait, containing layers of thought residues, all related to Jerusalem, the city where Poliakine grew up. Jerusalem is often present in her works—in painting, drawing, and print— through various attributes: a piano (from her parents' home); the combination The Corner of Hanevi'im and Shivtei Israel (Heb. Tribes and Prophets Streets—the location of the Jerusalem Print Workshop where she worked as a printmaker for over twenty years); mounds-hives (extracted from ancient maps of Jerusalem); and a silhouette (of Poliakine's own body). In Where are the Muses?, ancient map drawings of Jerusalem, red contours of the Three Graces from a Renaissance drawing, and the outlines of a grand piano referring to Else Lasker-Schüler's poem "My Blue Piano" from a book by that name, were grafted on top of one another.
In recent years, the balance between printmaking and painting in Poliakine's work has changed: less a printmaker and more a painter. Printmaking, with its history and the channels of cultural influence, became an inexhaustible conceptual and technical platform for the painterly action. As a result it took on a new meaning: a kingdom. Poliakine's kingdom is a superimposition that extends from prehistory to the present, and it is wholly comprised of stain and line.
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