Sublime Shortfilm performing on the beach in Tel-Aviv by Sari Fishman & Oron Dahan
 
This was the curator text of the exhibition in the beginning of February in Tel-Aviv: CANÇÃO DO MAR
 
Between Goethe’s Romanticism and Baudelaire’s Modernism
 
The exhibition title CANÇÃO DO MAR (“Song of the Sea”) draws its inspiration from the well-known Portuguese fado song, which served as a point of departure for a new emotional and visual expression. At the heart of the song stands the concept of saudade—a uniquely Portuguese term describing an existential state of deep longing; a sweet sorrow; yearning for something or someone who is absent, or perhaps never was; a “presence of absence.”
 
For Fishman, saudade is not a static emotional condition but a generative force—an opening toward the construction of an inner, life-affirming space. The dialogue with Portuguese melancholy gives birth to a body of material works; and at the end of the process—after the materials have dried, expanded, and settled on the canvas—a direct line of poetry is born, expressing Fishman’s intimate interpretation of longing as a lived experience:
 
“Seventeen times I sculpted.
I floated in a broken sea of simple dreams.
You holding my foot in your palm.”
 
The visual language Fishman presents in the exhibition is an inner mapping of transposed longing—the acceptance of saudade as a sensation that trembles on the horizon like an object in pure form. Fishman operates through a delicate technique of layering and interweaving. In contrast to superficial figurative attempts to depict external landscapes, her works engage in a deeper, more archetypal stratum—the blue, the ochre, the white—resting upon textural layers that preserve the work’s original pulse.
 
These are paintings that arise from within, yet do not attempt to overwhelm or dramatize. For Fishman, this is the refinement of an inner existence and the ability of a person to preserve within themselves a continuous contact with the “other,” without dissolving into it. The investigation of matter as phenomenology reveals a focused, attentive encounter with the very core of experience—without resorting to spectacle or theatricality.
 
The intellectual axis of the exhibition unfolds between Jena at the end of the eighteenth century—the cradle of German Romanticism—and the modernist poetics of Baudelaire. As the Romantic circle rebelled against the conventions of their time, so too does Fishman rebel against fixed aesthetic categories of “beautiful” or “ugly.” Her works seek a direct encounter—one that dissolves binaries. The sanctification of personal experience, as articulated in her poetry, is not merely decorative but philosophical: the artist’s subjectivity becomes a vessel for both longing and transformation.
 
This conception expands into the video work FEET, which documents a conscious walking practice within water—where the tension between the desire to float and the fear of sinking becomes a metaphor for surrender and transformation.
 
Sari Fishman is a multidisciplinary artist. Her works have been exhibited internationally and are represented by galleries in Vienna and Japan. Her books Inner Self Portrait (2024) and Overdose (2025) further establish her as a creator who moves freely between disciplines. The exhibition invites the viewer into a contemplative experience—one that preserves inner tension while allowing for a deeply personal presence within the shifting sea of human experience.