In Matisse’s Harmony in Red, the main motif is the interplay between the decorative compositions of the wallpaper and the tablecloth, whereas the painted figure of a woman is fitted into this pattern and absorbed in it. Adar Bechar, on the other hand, grants the woman autonomy and transforms her into an active and creative agent, into an artist who gradually changes Matisse’s original painting by pushing to the extreme the flattening effect towards complete erasure. This way, Adar Bechar’s maid anticipates, as it were, the notion of erasure, a procedure that was to become most important in modern art some 50 years after Matisse had painted his painting, notably in the work of Robert Rauschenberg. In 1953, Rauschenberg approached Willem de Kooning with an offer to buy one of his drawings in order to erase it. De Kooning consented, and having erased the drawing, Rauschenberg entitled it Erased de Kooning.

An expression of the idea of erasure and destruction can also be found in children’s paintings, and, according to author and philosopher Georges Bataille, in the creative impulse in general. Bataille argues that the child’s scrawling derives, like cave paintings, from a desire to vandalize. Moreover, he insists that underlying the artistic act is the desire to destroy and deform what there is before the subject rather than the will to represent and simulate. According to Bataille, rather than serving the pleasure principle, art is a by product of the death drive.

The visual language of Adar Bechar’s work is akin to that of the infancy phase of cinema, especially of Georges Méliès’s films. His films, too, strive to flatten the cinematic frame instead of trying to reproduce reality. Méliès creates an imaginary, fantastic world in which the frame functions as a stage. Standing on this stage, the director-magician performs a series of metamorphoses both in the space and the characters, metamorphoses the like of which can also be seen in Adar Bechar’s film.

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