Lavih Serfaty Painting and Art


Lavih Serfaty



“...It was in the 70’s, when I had the opportunity of visiting the Sinai Desert numerous times. I was deeply influenced by the movement of light as it fell over the dunes, rocks, villages and some isolated houses, changing their colors gradually. The desert landscapes fascinated me. I had to paint them. I wanted to decipher their structure, what they are made of.”

The wish for reconciliation appears in different ways in Serfaty’s art.
In his aquarelles the sky and earth fuse gently and villages progressively emerge from the earth. The human presence does not interfere with Nature’s forces, but adapts and adopts its immense rhythm, becoming an integral part of it. Serfaty’s use of aquarelle colors deeply emphasizes this process of integration. The transparent colors bleed beyond out the lines and bind opposite components of the painting: they connect human constructions to Nature structures, attach a house to a mountain.
The white background on which the transparent colors are laid, functions as an inner source of light, which illuminates the whole painting from within. Serfaty recalls: “Those villages reminded me of the views of Morocco, where houses are painted white, with blue and turquoise windows, creating an impressive contrast with the reddish soil background. As the bright, glaring light altered throughout the day, it reshaped the shadows and emphasized the contrasted colors of Nature...”