OVERDOSE | When Fantasy Crosses the Line
- Susan Rein
- Mar 5
- 3 min read
Updated: May 9
Sari Fishman: A Glimpse at the Moment of Convergence
By the time you encounter her—kneeling in the water, her body arched backward, an orange dress clinging to her like a second skin, the same color as her hair, the same color as her latest series—it is already too late. Something irreversible has taken place.
This is the cover image. This is the closing frame of a long chapter. OVERDOSE, the exhibition, began a year and a half ago as a slow rupture: from latent force to action, from poems hidden in drawers to bookstore shelves, from illustrations to a full-bodied exhibition, from an intimate monologue in Hebrew—to English, and now Italian. This October, her solo show opens at Rossocinabro Gallery in Florence, as part of Italy’s Contemporary Art Week organized by AMACI (Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums). It marks the twelfth time Sari Fishman exhibits in Italy—a country that has always been, for her, an artistic north star.
For this exhibition, Inner Self Portrait was translated into Italian by Alon Elster, creating a bridge between the poetry and the new visual works that will confront Florentine viewers.
Sari Fishman grew up breathing art. The granddaughter of Hillel Fishman, the daughter of Dov Fishman, she learned early that creation is inheritance, not profession. The first book that cracked open her world was The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone. Now, she presents her work a few hundred meters from the Medici Chapel, where Michelangelo’s sculptures hold their eternal vigil.
She began with Lorenzo—the poet, the thinker, Il Penseroso—and she ends, perhaps, as Night, La Notte, lying beneath Giuliano, the man of action, the overdose she longed for. Now, at the Giuliano stage of her life— is this only a beginning? Or will the overdose lead to an ending? To death? To the death of creation?
The exhibition presents 28 works. Some are paintings in mixed media—cement, tar, silicone, acrylic, spray paint, embedded fences. Others are close-up photographs that seize the moment of collision between gesture and matter. Three of the works were born in another context—Fishman’s Water Pollution series. Here, they return transformed: washed in bright orange, smeared across the canvas using parts of her own body. It’s a reclaiming of contamination as creation. A kind of resurrection through stain. In one, the paint pools like diluted blood. In another, it spills like bile. And yet, there’s beauty. A horrible, intimate, irresistible beauty.
Water reemerges as the ghost motif of this show. Not just in pigment and texture, but in presence.
They are unfinished by design. Composed through impulse, through erotic urgency, through flashes of need. This is not academic abstraction. This is non finito—not as style, but as wound. Life is not a closed form, nor love, nor clarity. Neither is this.
From her poetry collection Inner Self Portrait, one fragment echoes through everything:
FROM A DISTANCE IT'S BEST
that way
no one gets hurt
to blur you inside the frame
to transform you
into a breathtaking impressionist picture
from a distance it’s best
that way
you will there remain
do not move idée
fixe
stimulated and wet
The poems orbit around longing. Fantasies that collapse against the hard surface of reality. One-sided desires. Forbidden intimacies. The artworks are not illustrations—they are tactile eruptions of the same broken yearning.
Black dominates—but always mutates: tar, silicone, acrylic, each with its own temperature and skin. And across the blackness—again and again—a fence is imprinted: the symbol of restraint, prohibition, the futile attempt to contain the inevitable flood.
And the orange? The orange is Fishman herself: a wild redhead, a Lilith figure, fearless, insatiable, untamed.
Except—perhaps—in the final triptych.
In the final triptych, the orange—the echo of the artist’s own body—spreads, smears, dissolves into the surface. It is no longer a color of vitality, but a residue, a remnant. The black advances, heavy and absolute, completing what the orange began. The fences fall away. There is no more resistance. Only the raw dominance of matter.
The blue that bleeds in afterward is not catharsis. It is the cold aftermath of surrender.
There is something inevitable and devastating about OVERDOSE. It is not a warning. It is not an accusation. It is a confession. The point where passion overflows its container, and there is nothing left to save but the beauty of the ruin itself.
The tombs of Lorenzo and Giuliano are still standing, carved in immortal stone. But in a gallery a few hundred meters away, a woman is breaking open the space between them.
And the water rises.
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