Michel Tabori was born in Paris in 1956 and grew up in New York. He spent the better part of the last thirty years working as a director, producer and cinematographer living and working all over the world. Tabori began working as a visual artist only a little over five years ago, and is currently based in Venice, California. The artist’s rapid maturity and clarity of vision in this new medium are due, in part, to the fact that he has incorporated his cinematic expertise and visual creativity to the current process. In fact, much of his earlier work started out as a series of photographs.

Each work begins as an inspiration, occasioned by nature, by a person, by music. Not surprisingly, all are preoccupied with effects of light and motion. Much of it began as photographs of forests, shot from a motorcycle at 75 miles per hour while traveling through Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. Some are of landscapes reflected off the spur of a boot or the barrel of a gun. Still others are portraits of people who have touched Tabori’s life. All are influenced by a sense of music, of rhythm. The images are then distilled to an elemental, abstract essence. Essential details are emphasized and enlarged. Colors are exaggerated and distorted to better reflect the underlying truth of the experience. Once painting is complete they are then poured with resin and painted again, often several times, giving the work multiple optical layers above the paint. If you ask the artist, he will tell you that the works are “Flexible Light Installations,” meaning that the work has no absolute dimension, but rather flows like liquid in scale to the context in which it is exhibited. The experience is subjective, variable. It involves light and shadow, surface and depth, reflection and refraction. It is the poetry of a moment and the moment is never static.

As Tabori sums up, “The surface of the canvas for me is not the primary focus. I am more concerned with movement in it and around it and also how that movement is constantly changing. The paintings are meant to interact with what is reflected in the environment, to include it as an integral part of the piece. In this sense, looking at the piece is, for me, more about moving through it, looking at it from different angles. I love the idea of people looking at a piece of overwhelming scale, or in a crowded room, where it is impossible to take it all in unobstructed, to see the entire piece at once. This way, the work is always changing.”

Today, Tabori’s primary focus is on taking his work into the third dimension by combining his production experience with that of his painting to create sculpture installations that include painting, set design, lighting, sound and music score as well as video images. His upcoming installation is a celebration of nature called Regenesis.