TAL AMITAI-LAVI

"Green on the Outside, Red on the Inside" is a critical, reflective, and humorous exploration of representation, aesthetics, genres, and the relationship between interior and exterior. In this installation, Tal Amitai-Lavi engages in a dialogue with art history, exploring two Western genres: still life and landscape painting.
By dismantling and reconstructing their immediate sociocultural encodings, she replaces the false semblance of realistic simulacrum with a consciously synthetic mimesis. The center of the installation features a large Perspex sheet with acrylic-filled suction cups attached to its surface. Utilizing a pointillist, pixelated approach where colors fuse only in the eye of the beholder, the laborious composition reveals a ravishing European forest scene.
At the foot of this artificial landscape, Amitai-Lavi disperses plaster casts of painted, punctured watermelons that resemble expressionless decapitated heads—a local, grotesque version of Jack-o'-lanterns. This botanical fallacy—the juxtaposition of watermelons with a European forest—is paired with another forest work, consisting of a serial composition of scented tree air fresheners for cars. From the scent of resin and pine, only the synthetic fragrance remains, intended—in a pathetic struggle—to stave off the smell of car exhaust or cigarettes; the civilized urban has completely displaced the wild natural.