Like writing a diary, which involves devotion to a binding and disciplined process, but at the same time it lacks written rules and you never know the end – so are Orna Bromberg’s paintings currently on display in the Malka, Bird Gallery at Givat Haim Ihud Gallery: her work is tough and demanding; Each series of paintings has a defined format, a fixed repository of images, the compositions are pre-planned and each painting and series is dated. Within the limits of the meticulous framework, however, there is a disturbance of law and order. It is permissible to doubt everything and do everything. Almost everything. Therefore, it is never possible to predict in advance what will happen in the work process, what occurrences will take place in the painting and how the colors will come true, which is the main means of expression.

The repertoire of images, which serves as a permanent system of signs, is related to childhood. It includes girls in various shows as well as clowns, butterflies, birds and flowers. The works seem to be related to a memory or memories from childhood, which involve temptation and longing alongside prohibition and danger. In works from recent years, hybrid combinations are created between female characters who are on the verge between childhood and adulthood and between images from the natural world such as butterfly and queen, girl and flower, bird and queen and more.

The paintings are painted in watercolor, gouache, tempera and pencil – “low” materials that characterize ancient cultures as well as children’s paintings. The painting style ranges from a schematic and initial figurative depiction, shedding layers of knowledge and aesthetic conventions, to meticulous detailed depiction, delicate drawing and stains, revealing a burden of deep artistic knowledge. Simplicity and complexity are woven into each other into bare, sometimes fragile arenas, touching on something beyond the literal. Every painting is a repeated and stubborn attempt to recapture exactly the same elusive thing. Thus, repetitiveness turns out to be a critical element in Bromberg’s work. The accumulation of repeated attempts reveals differences, sometimes tiny, between painting and the artists’ painting. Inconsistencies and violations of law that disrupt the attempt to interpret the picturesque scenes in a familiar and well-known context. Instead, the act of painting becomes apparent as an act of peeling and exposure, in which the painting is nothing but a hermetic riddle, encoding within it a layered and multifaceted world.