A Salad of Sun & Light

"Salad is Israel’s national dish. Anyone who has spent time abroad knows what it means to long for the sun, the sea, and the salad."
(from A Salad of Sun and Light, The Book of Delights by Amos Keinan).

 

The sculpture is inspired by Amos Keinan’s satirical writing on pleasure and taste. Chen Taoz, deeply connected to the “taste of vegetables” - an essential and inseparable part of an Israeli meal - places a visual mirror to the missed experiences in life, shaped by past and future planning, without presence in the moment.

 

The work illuminates an abundant, sensorial reservoir of fresh vegetables, locked behind chains and a heavy padlock - barriers that distort it and prevent the immediate, instinctive pleasure, the kind one experiences when opening a refrigerator door.

 

Through this fictional object, Chen Taoz creates a satire of the desire to hoard, echoing Keinan’s words: “Flavor has no quantity, flavor is not property, and flavor cannot be stored.”

 

At first glance, the base appears as a superfluous warehouse of restrained abundance. Over the course of the exhibition, time drives natural processes of growth and change within the fresh vegetables - and with them, the color of the light inside the sculpture shifts: beginning as white, gradually turning yellow, and eventually becoming green.

 

On a second look, this transformation of light becomes a direct visual metaphor for the shifting “flavors,” values, and meanings Keinan writes about, illustrating the misery of those who fail to understand that “one can only enjoy flavor in the present.”

​

 - from the curatorial text by Marina Pozner.

​

The work was exhibited on 1-4/2026 at the Beit Ha'am Gallery, Nahalal.