Tal Boniel
An artist and graphic designer, Tal Boniel is a BDes and MDes graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, currently completing an MA in the Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Tel Aviv University. A Schneidinger Foundation scholarship recipient, he has also been recognized with the Friends of Bezalel Award and the Mike Felheim Prize for Outstanding Typography. His work deals with the study of images, examining fundamental issues relating to replicas and originals, presence and absence, representation and the lack thereof, history and archives, testimony and memory. By amassing and assembling random everyday images into colleges he creates a network of historical, public and local connections, generating associations to a variety of cultural archetypes or well-known icons from the history of art. In this series, Boniel seeks to create a new visual world using pixelated, grainy, enlarged and reprinted readymade images from the 1960s and 1970s, transforming many of them into prototypical-mythological stories (the Binding of Isaac, the Pieta and the Descent from the Cross) and loading others with a nostalgic aura that longs for the past. As the image evolves, as it is endlessly scanned, reproduced and disseminated online, it becomes diluted until it is nothing but a ‘ghost’ of itself. By transforming the works into a two-dimensional print and then into a unique framing that raises it to three dimensions, his actions return the material to the image and create a mature and multidimensional body of work. In cutting, enlarging and “diving” into images and juxtaposing them, Boniel seeks to reveal the secret, solve the riddle, discover the absent – to decipher something that does not exist solely through the observation of newly-formed connections. The works presented here were developed from the final project of the MDes Program in Visual Communication at Bezalel, Jerusalem Academy of Art and Design.
