“Hanna Sahar’s new exhibition, The Wallpaper Series, in fact consists of three complementing series – photographs of natural views, still lives and female nudes; ostensibly different series from which a similar essence is ultimately extracted, albeit in different manners. Most of the images in the exhibition are multi-layered, stratified with visual, cultural and philosophical contexts…One may say that in the current exhibition, Sahar’s work is underlied by iconic thought. Thought reluctant to attest, disinclined to yield the subjective specificity of any image; thought which is channeled toward a profound, compressed and dark sphere where different times, eras and planes blend together…

At first furtive glance, the majority of works echo the spirit of Romanticism: The spirit of nature, glory and splendor; that of the sublime quality inherent in natural elements vis-a-vis the insignificance off man. However, a closer look reveals that they deviate, or practically invert, the ideological, conceptual and emotional rudiments of the Romantic period…

Unlike artists of the Romantic Period, the gaze in Sahar’s work is only ostensibly romantic… Sahar does not turn toward nature a clean, transparent or refined gaze, a gaze believing that potential goodness is still concealed there somewhere, due to the basic yet profound insight that such a gaze is no longer possible. Instead, Sahar’s gaze is a melancholic, turbid gaze, turned toward nature which may be artificial or manipulated, often replicated. it is an interrupted, mediated , masked gaze; a burdened, weary, scarred gaze.But at the same time, it is also a gaze whose vitality cannot be regulated, let alone contained; a gaze that at once duplicates and deconstructs its object…Thus, for Sahar, the existing exists by decision alone; it exists in active action rather than in passive acceptance of nature or the world…