As published in the catalog for The Sound of Longing, Oct. 2023

I write this essay about Dov Talpaz, an Israeli-American artist, during the period of the Jewish High Holidays: the Ten Days of Teshuvah (Repentance). It feels appropriate; I see his paintings as entwined with a search for personal betterment, a humanist quest. Over the past several years, Talpaz has focused on simplifying his compositions, using colored paper and latex collage as a tool in this process. It is not reductive; he is searching for essentials: deep meanings in complex stories, human connection, and love. He sees decision-making in the painting process as a parallel to decision-making in life. 

In the opening sequence of Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1952 historical drama film, The Life of Oharu, the main character, Oharu, who experiences a tragic fall from societal ranking and grace, hallucinates the faces of her former lovers in rows of Buddhist idols in a temple. We watch as the arhat statues metamorphose from real people’s faces and then back to the stylized features of the statues. It is a visualization of the problem that will haunt Oharu: her constant exile from physical and earthly love—for her parents, her first true love, her son, and her husband. And, despite behavior which is usually noble and non-materialistic, she is always viewed by society as a sinner and a whore. 

Talpaz has drawn inspiration from this film—along with other films by Mizoguchi and his contemporary, the filmmaker Yasujirō Ozo—to create paintings, including his two 2021 paintings Ugetsu and Oharu. In these works, Talpaz focuses on pathos, melancholy, and interpersonal drama: their downturned brows, the tilt of their heads, the proximity or separation between the figures as they crouch or sit on tatami mats in simplified interiors. Although Talpaz defines these spaces with saturated color planes, the brushwork, modeling, and curving forms become signs for the emotional depth, pain, and complexities of the stories.

Talpaz says simply, “I paint stories.” He connects it to the pleasant memory of his father reading bedtime stories and freely adding his own imaginative twists. Talpaz adds, “In my work, I try to do the same—to retell stories through painting and capture their essence.” The balance between abstraction and representation in his retelling is significant. It connects to the title of this exhibition and catalog: The Sound of Longing. 

The Life of Oharu is a story about exile: one tragic exile after another. Talpaz connects to the theme of exile as an immigrant who has struggled to find a true sense of belonging and home in both the United States and Israel. As he writes:

In my paintings, the main character often experiences a sense of aloneness or in I'm a state of contemplation. Growing up in Israel but being born in Texas, I never felt that one place was a true "home" for me. I constantly traveled back and forth between these two countries and had to navigate being a bit of a foreigner in each.

The teacher who likely influenced Talpaz the most was the painter Rosemarie Beck, a “second-generation” Abstract Expressionist who developed a remarkable body of figurative painting. Her subjects were literary and mythological narratives. In 2013, I wrote the following about Beck:

Orpheus, Antigone, Phaedra, and The Tempest are all stories of forbidden loves and exile. And Beck subjected herself to a form of exile, becoming a figurative painter in the 1960s. In all painting, the space between flatness and tactility is a space between longing and having. It is a space of desire. Beck’s hatched stroke, the way her paintings are woven, the way she pieces forms together with marks, increases this space of desire. In contrast, it is an act of possession to fluidly find one’s way around form. Beck made paintings about human desire and jealousy, and she deliberately left her forms open, with those woven, hatched marks. By not closing lines, she keeps herself, and us, in a state of partial exile, a tantalizing state of longing, not possessing.

Talpaz does not use a hatched mark like his teacher Beck, but he is certainly interested in this state of longing. In his depictions of Mizoguchi’s films, the sense of longing comes from the enclosed rooms with glimpses of the world beyond. In addition, by emphasizing the abstraction of the painting, and by synthesizing the feeling of the films, rather than illustrating a specific scene, he leaves them open for our own interpretation. 

In Talpaz’s painting The Blessing of the Wrong Son (2023), he depicts the biblical story of Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Esau. Jacob and Esau fought for their father’s approval and blessing. Rebecca, their mother, conspired with Jacob to trick Isaac—by relying on his poor eyesight—into blessing Jacob, rather than his first-born, Esau. The story doesn’t have one clear “moral,” rather it lends itself to complex interpretation: Is it about familial deception? Who is the victim? Or is it about the process of enlightenment and spiritual redemption as opposed to material greed? Talpaz does not take sides in his depiction. There is no wicked son or sinner, no trickery: each character is sympathetic and melancholic. Talpaz states:

I perceive biblical stories as poems that reveal aspects of the self. Therefore, all the characters, including God, represent different parts of oneself. They reflect the reader's or viewer's emotional spectrum and explore the mysteries of the human soul. The figures in my painting may appear anatomically peculiar, but still belong to the painting's own palpable world.

I see Talpaz’s depiction of the story as focused especially on Isaac and Rebecca’s relationship with their children: their hands and arms connected to those of Jacob and Esau. It is a deeply problematic and difficult moment, but Talpaz recognizes the love that Isaac and Rebecca feel for their children, and the deep flaws that all parents have, navigating and balancing societal pressures while also trying to protect their children, even if this causes conflict or distance between the married couple. (This, incidentally, is also a major theme in The Life of Oharu). 

In Talpaz’s The Blessing of the Wrong Son, familial warmth is reflected by his choice of orange, gold, and umber tones to mark the interior where the family is seated, while dark grays and blacks expose the night landscape beyond the arched entryway. One streak of blue and a crescent moon signifies light at the upper left, and Talpaz chose to bring this into the interior of the space. These simplifications and abstractions of interior connect to the paintings of Henri Matisse from the 1910s, in which views beyond the window are suggested by simplified geometric angles of light—the spaces of desire and longing. 

Although it is a leitmotif throughout many of Matisse’s paintings, I think of The Piano Lesson (1916), in particular, where a triangle of green signifies landscape beyond, and it echoes the form of the metronome and a triangular plane / shadow on the student’s face as he plays. Many of Talpaz’s paintings utilize such reduced and simplified compositional structures to define spaces and relationships between inside and outside.

In fact, another subject running through Talpaz’s work is that of musicians. Talpaz once found inspiration in the early Paul Cézanne painting Young Girl at the Piano (Overture to Tannhäuser), (1869–70) in which wallpaper patterns on the back wall reflect the music being played. Talpaz’s recent musician paintings reflect his own upbringing—with his mother being a pianist and music teacher. More specifically, he depicts traveling American bluesmen, often using the portraits in Les Blank documentaries as source material. The traveling musician is a stand-in for the eternal immigrant. In Talpaz’s musician paintings, he turns his gaze to focus almost exclusively on the musician and their instrument, whether it be a guitar, a saxophone, a flute, or an accordion. The landscapes or grounds are loosely scumbled in, as if to highlight the purity of the connection to music, regardless of place. In Mizoguchi’s film, Oharu’s brief interaction with an itinerant singer is a pivotal moment. She has money—and empathy—to offer the singer; she has just returned home to her family after months spent working in a brothel. As an audience, we feel hope. Yet this scene also foreshadows her own future: the destitution and sadness which will continue to deepen. 

Talpaz also addresses the theme of the eternal immigrant in his paintings of horse riders—a recurrent motif in his work over the last 20 years. He began depicting riders after reading the stories of Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel who was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa in 1894 and lived through pogroms as a child. Babel’s collection, Red Cavalry, reflect his lived experience assigned to the cavalry in the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, where he was forced to conceal his Jewish identity. Talpaz also has spent time visiting and re-visiting Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider (c. 1655), a painting which is still shrouded in mystery and uncertainty. It is not known whether the work represents a specific subject or a story. As art historian Julius Held wrote in his 1944 essay, “Rembrandt’s ‘Polish’ Rider:” Enough unanswered questions will remain to stir our curiosity, enough strangeness to provide material for our imagination; above all the shining youth who himself seems to be in search of something distant, unmindful of things close and familiar,  still withholds from us, like another Lohengrin, the secret of his name.

The lack of known or intended specificity in terms of portraiture in The Polish Rider does not detract from meaning; instead the rider becomes even more relatable. It is his humanity and soul quality which shines through the painting. This is what Talpaz most admires in Rembrandt’s work. In the late 1620s, connoisseur Constantijn Huygens wrote of Rembrandt’s ability to capture the “movements of the soul.” In the late 19th Century, German scholar Wilhelm von Bode discussed how Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro effects allowed him to suppress surface details so that he could render “souls rather than existences.” I see, in Rembrandt’s portraits, a quest to depict the inner light—and life—of his subjects. Centuries later, we still feel this as we look at, and into, his paintings. 

Talpaz has focused on suppressing surface details to interrogate the essential humanism of his stories. In this, he also connects to the work of Bob Thompson (1937–66), who in his brief but extremely prolific career, revisited the history of European painting and mythological stories using a new visual language of intense chroma and silhouetted, simplified forms and figures. Thompson also made jazz musicians a subject of his painting. It is only in recent scholarship that Thompson’s direct references to the civil rights issues of his time, and the violence enacted upon Blacks, have been recognized. I believe that the inherent “abstraction” and the liberties Thompson took with his palette have been misunderstood as apolitical.

Similar is the challenge that Talpaz’s work offers: its balance between the personal and the universal. His work is informed by not only the biblical, mythological, and filmic stories, but also by familial and political ones: the stories of his grandparents and his relatives from Poland and Lithuania, who he only knew through the memories and stories told by his parents. His grandparents made it to Israel before the war, but their relatives were all killed in the Holocaust.  As Talpaz has noted: 

I never had the chance to meet my grandparents. They were originally from Lithuania and Poland and passed away before I was born. However, I've always had a strange sense of connection to their land and cultures. I would dream as if I were my grandfather (whom I am named after) and hear stories about him. In describing the term “Postmemory” Columbia Professor Marianne Hirsch explains: “It describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before, to experiences they ‘remember’ only by the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up…Postmemory´s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.“ Painting a place, a certain memory of a landscape is a way to connect to the past or to one’s roots. 

Thompson engaged in a similar pursuit; see, for instance, his early and significant painting The Funeral of Jan Müller (1958), depicting an artist he never met, and whose funeral he did not attend. Like Thompson, Talpaz uses simple shapes to represent deep, mysterious stories.  Talpaz has said that constructing his collages can provide a “break” from the emotional depth of oil painting. But of course, even as they do provide a path to eliminate unnecessary surface details, there is no break from emotional depth. The pathos, melancholy, and the love and difficulty of familial connection, is within the stories and these paintings. The choices Talpaz makes as he reduces, simplifies, and organizes color and form, become an analogy to complex life decisions and a way for us to connect with our own inner worlds. 

Jennifer Samet is a New York City-based art historian, curator, and writer who specializes in contemporary and post-war painting. She is the Director of Eric Firestone Gallery and a member of the faculty at the New York Studio School. She completed her B.A. at Barnard College and her Ph.D. at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

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By Alice Zinnes on her blog Entopvisions, published on 11.5.2023

The title, “The Sound of Longing,” is perfect for the exhibition of paintings by Dov Harel Talpaz, now hanging at SARHCROWN, through Nov. 25. Dov’s paintings are songs of the human experience, of the deepest of ancient emotions, the emotions between lovers, parents and siblings, between ourselves and the unexplainable world beyond ourselves. Dov often begins with a biblical story, or the narrative of a film by, for instance, Mizoguchi, and though the main characters, such as Jacob, Esau, Rebecca and Issac, are all there, Dov’s paintings are not illustrations of the stories. Much as the biblical or film characters, according to Talpaz, are not literal people, but rather metaphors that “reveal aspects of the self,” his paintings also are not literal representations of the original stories. Through fine-tuned color and shape, detail and generality, facial expression, gesture, and choreography, his paintings create an internal music that brings us into our inner cores, where our own sad, hurt and confused – but also hopeful – emotions lurk. However, though Dov’s paintings do indeed suggest universals, they actually grow out of his personal life. An Israeli/American, throughout childhood Dov moved frequently between the two countries, suffering a nagging, anchorless dislocation – but he also became centered through the melodious piano playing by his mother – and these two opposing sensations permeate his work. As an addendum, with Dov’s Israeli roots, it’s tempting to read the current Middle East hostilities into his paintings. These paintings, however, were made before the war began, and though political tensions might intrude subtly, as they do for all Israelis – and perhaps all thinking people – Dov’s paintings reflect the deeper, eternal struggles of being human, rather than the conflicts of the day-to-day. Dov is a humanist, not political commentator. Accompanying the exhibition is an excellent catalogue essay by Jennifer Samet.

Originally published on Wall Street International / April 2017

If every color of a painting was a tone, and every work of art a musical composition, what would the song sound like? This is a question that might occur to the casual exhibit goer and critic alike while taking in the paintings of Dov Talpaz, now on display at Slag Gallery.

The series of colorful, graphic, and captivating paintings have a recurrent subject: the trumpet. In a majority of the works, this music instrument has been twisted and elongated, and by appearing in different forms and sizes, it becomes the main character in the tale of a composition that chants the energies through which it plays. The squared monochromatic backgrounds emphasize a mystic emptiness caused by the simplification of possible narrative elements, and there is evidence of a strong story and melody throughout each piece.

Previously known for using a more traditional and figurative painting style, this new series investigates the power of reduction of narrative components and color in search of a simpler emotional language that conveys only the intended essence of the piece. Inspired from his rich exposure to music since childhood, Talpaz amplifies the trumpet’s image, using many different perspectives, and he projects humanlike characteristics on the instrument almost to the point of confusion with the characters on his stages.

Since early practice, Talpaz has painted scenes of life that he had encountered in novels and films. One of his favourite movies, for example, is Shawshank Redemption (1994), and he was inspired by the Russian literary greats, including Dostoyevsky, Checov, and Tolstoy. In the same way he was influenced by literature and film, he used the music of John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk to guide his artistry in his trumpet series.

Talpaz reduced and flattened the images of his stories to flat, colored areas, to the sum and substance of those stories. Isolated figures are represented through lines and shapes that follow a unique harmony of color and time. The arrangement of the elements of each painting is premeditated, and the colors are chosen in advance so that they are applied subsequently, in more of a rhythmic pattern than a melodic one. The pulse of the paintings emotes a certain kind of muted energy, while remaining respectful enough to refrain from overwhelming the viewer.

In Melodic Intimacy I (2016), for example, a trumpet dominates the scene on a pinkish background. Its tubes have been stretched to an awkward length and are torched, assuming the form of two legs that touch a shadow on the bottom. An overarching question surfaces with this particular work: do we see the shadow of the trumpet or that of an elongated figure, standing outside of the painting? The different colors that compose the trumpet’s tubes are applied in a simple way, but they invite the eye to follow the lines, and they convey the energy that hovers throughout the painting.

Red Corner (2016), on the other hand, is composed of flat colored areas and a small detail of a stylized face, potentially depicting a crude image of a clown. A peeping eye is discovered from the upper corner that slants towards the bottom of the painting, and although there is no other facial cue present, there is a certain melancholy to the face that is startlingly evident. The painting is composed by nothing more than large color fields and few signs, yet the message (and to the literary enthusiasts, the source of inspiration, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) rings clear.

Music notes are fully realized when played in a time-based sequence, the audible composition. If one were to transpose one of Talpaz’s paintings into a musical piece, one would most likely require a larger staff (more than the customary five lines). And even though the works themselves might represent a rhythmic exercise of different tones, played successively one right after the other, they continue to maintain the integrity of the existing elements, colors, and shapes that all collaborate together in a perfect harmony, creating a visual symphony brimming with emotion and feeling.

Sarah Corona is an Art Historian, Dealer, and Curator specialized in Post-War and Contemporary Art. She is the founder of SARAHCROWN located in Tribeca, New York. She holds an MA in Fine Arts and a Doctoral Degree in Art History from the University of Bologna (Italy) and Universitè Paris 8, Paris, (France). Holding a wide range of positions in the art world, she has curated, published, and advanced the arts internationally and at many different levels.