| In these works, the cloth is alive: it inhales and exhales, it stretches and shrinks, it takes fresh forms, it twists and turns, and it becomes larger or smaller as it is subjected to solutions of inexhaustible dynamism and vigour.
Casting aside any danger of falling into monotonous juxtaposition and platitude, Alcalay gives her simple cloth its autonomy, transforming it into a self-contained entity, a distinct "creature" with a host of allusive capacities of its own.
The striped cloth is suggested very loudly here, playing the leading role either
in absolute predominance or in conjunction with other textiles. It is allusive precisely because it exists as a “body” in which the colour-light and the chiaroscuro of the composition act together in relation to the individual pleats and folds, the overlapping sections, the complex folds and the various "artifices." |
What is taking place in each of these works, then, is a kind of adventure, one which we are called upon to watch in all its manifestations, from the slightest ruck in the cloth to the most complex fold. That adventure bears within it something of the essence of all the aspects of advancing human destiny.
It is precisely that element which endows the works of Alcalay with an ineffable yet substantive poetry."
 Dr. Dora Iliopoulou-Rogan
Art historian, art critic
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