Alexandra Zuckerman: Seas

By Irena Gordon

December 2022

The series Color Cuts originated in the technique. Using soft pastel chalks in shades of red, purple, yellow, brown, green, and blue, Alexandra Zuckerman creates quasi-uniform spaces that appear as though they were done mechanically, but, in fact, they are the result of a long, meticulous manual process. Each drawing has its own color and pattern, which in some cases is clearly visible and in others virtually disappears against the backdrop of the uniform rectangularity of the painted area. The cuts were inspired by “Burda” sewing patterns and created using tailors’ measuring tapes, in continuation of a previous series which was based on embroidery manuals.

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The guiding principle of the series (parts of which are presented in this exhibition) is reduction, limitations, or constraints: using a fixed-sized paper surface, filling the area with repeated application of pastel chalks, within strict borders determined by a large stencil. Due to the dry quality of the pastel chalks, their strokes on the paper—manually covering an area in “slow motion”—generate a layer of color that appears to have been spread above, as the encounter with the white paper margins creates the appearance of a print. Only one color is applied to each sheet, and the composition is created in the space in-between the drawings. Each drawing affects the adjacent drawings, and at the same time it is affected by and transformed in relation to them, revealing an interplay between the white margins of the drawings, arranged side by side in the space in one possible configuration out of an almost infinite potential of dialogic combinations.

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The work within this formal structure avoids any representation or image, explicit or implicit. The series thus continues the modernist tradition of non-figurative abstraction, but carries a sensuous, soft, dreamy sculptural quality. Zuckerman’s colorful spaces call one to experience “existence,” as an expansion of time and place that may be sensed through the subtle changes and deviations in the hues and cutting of the surfaces, which at first glance appear uniform, but upon a closer look surrender discernible movement.

The drawings surround the viewer and require both focused and spread out observation. Each color materiality leads to different scenic and mental realms, while the varying geometric subtractions transform the drawings into sculptural-architectural elements. The work’s Hebrew title, Yamim, is the plural form of both sea and day—a watery movement that embeds time and alludes to the absent-present representation activated by the painterly planes, which keep on metamorphosing within our consciousness.