The exhibition “Flickering Faces” comprises seven animated portraits of seven different figures from Dor Bar Shlomo’s immediate surroundings. The sitters, from people passing by his Jaffa studio, through friends from town, served as the artist’s subjects for his study of the animated portrait and its potential to enable a deeper entry into the sitter’s being.

The process began with Bar Shlomo making a video portrait of each subject in a comfortable pose, setting, and clothing of the sitter's choice, in their natural environment (such as home, store, and the like), or in the artist’s studio. Bar Shlomo then sought a typical motion or gesture that would “disclose” the sitter’s personality, such as a nod, wink, raised eyebrow, or restless foot movement. After several rapid sketches, he painted the first frame of the portrait in acrylic on wood or in ink on paper, followed by paintings of three additional frames based on observation of the initial frame. He then arranged the images on a timeline on his computer. The tiny, unavoidable differences between the four frames are what create the basic animation of the portrait. As Bar Shlomo stated, “This is what makes the paintings breathe.” The final step was to animate the sitter’s movement or unique gesture, thus “putting ‘soul’ into the painting.”

The underlying concept of the exhibition is the motivation to create a visual animation that is not film, but animated painting. It is not surprising that Bar Shlomo chose the portrait as his motif; as art historian Michael Fried stated, faces and paintings are "without question the two most concentratedly expressive ’surfaces’ … whose claim on the viewer is most intensive and undeniable."[i] This is best reflected in Bar Shlomo’s portraits of Andrey, Carmela, and Abed. The manual animation and the handling of the acrylics and ink imbue the works with a physical dimension and qualities of moisture, density, and physicality, sharpening the physiognomic reading of the sitters.

Bar Shlomo is a passionate admirer of Dostoevsky, praising his ability “to create literary portraits that make one feel as if he were right there in the same room with his protagonists, speaking the same language, knowing them personally.” There is something very introverted and poetic achieved and intensified in Bar Shlomo’s expressive painterly, soundless animation, capturing the sitters’ involuntary or unconscious gestures: rare “off camera” moments are perceived even though the sitters were entirely aware of being filmed. It is interesting to compare them to Andy Warhol’s filmed portraits in the “Screen Tests” series, raising questions as to how “natural” one can be facing the lens.

The flickering quality of the portraits, with the jumps or slight trembling, breathing life into the paintings, arises from the high degree of freedom in making the three additional frames, deliberately avoiding any precise copying. The resulting animated portraits may be seen as the direct “descendants” of portraits by Expressionist painters such as Edvard Munch, Van Gogh, and Oskar Kokoschka, whose paintings are also characterized by a flickering quality and painterly values designed to mediate emotions and feelings rather than precise physiological similarity. Bar Shlomo also used this technique in his 2021 film The Poetry of Non-Self, which engaged in the “tendency to lose the feeling of self when experiencing beauty.” He links his attraction to flicker to the way in which it can reflect a tempestuous mood or physical state characteristic of his anxious lived experience. In this sense, the exhibition as a whole can be seen as Bar Shlomo’s self-portrait to the same extent as it depicts the sitters.

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[i] Michael Fried, Why photography matters as art as never before, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 149.