Artisans

Nissim Aloni, the play-writer and Bergner's closest friend, described Bergner's pictorial language in a preface to his 1983 exhibition at the Parke Gallery, Tel Aviv: 'His pictures are a record of his days, he turns the years into windows through which he can observe his cellars and attics from a look-out point in the present, as far as his eye reaches. He sees himself as a chronicler: he documents himself in his surroundings, and he notes down the atmosphere of the changes which happen in his landscape. Through the years, these changes appear to him as cycles, as do the subjects of his pictures: repeating, floating and reappearing, and confronting each other before his eyes... There are many still lifes... he paints them continually. He paints still lifes as though to install stabilizers against the turbulence of the dream, and perhaps these stabilizers serve him in time as a touchstone. For, looking through the window-years, he wonders what was right in the old grater and what is right in the new grater - after all, both of them suffer and cause suffering, in spite of the changes'.