Rafael Wardi's works are neither still images nor documents. They live and breathe on many levels. The first movement is in depth with light and colour making the works breathe. The second movement takes place in time, both linear and cyclical. Present here are history and the tradition of painting, as well as the cycle of life. Some of the people depicted in the paintings have died by the time they are viewed. I am shaken to write this, but I know I must do it. The third movement links us to the world as individuals with an expansion of the horizon of understanding produced by a movement between things general and specific. I too will die and age! These are my fellow human beings! "Don't quarrel with your mother unnecessarily," says Wardi to me when our conversation strays from the art world. Or are life and art still united?

Wardi's fast pastel technique combines perception with memory. He begins with an observation – a lump on a hand, a groove in the skin or the light and shadow of a night lamp on the face of his wife Reetta, but he does not strive for realistic documentation. "I work very fast. The important thing is to remember. I don't want to use photographs; I do what I remember. When I remember something it has gone into me, into my hand. I sharpen my recollection all the time by drawing and painting." Paradoxically, when memory sharpens and clarifies it also changes from the specific to the general. Through my personal history, a moment in the nursing home can change into an aspect of Jewishness, or of the whole history of painting. Traumas and unorganized areas become part of some larger entity. And it is the entity, the whole, that interests Wardi: "The whole has disintegrated… the artist can bring forth that whole…" It is this pendulum movement of hermeneutic understanding between the general and the specific that makes Wardi's art endure, even though the works involve the recording of memory, they are not just still images of the present life of this particular artist, of this particular observation. "When you paint, you enter an area that cannot be understood in written terms," says Wardi. "You have to understand these things with instinct and the senses," he notes while looking at his own works. And he doesn't always recognize himself either: "I wonder what I was trying to say in that one? The figures seem to be stepping forth from the past."