Talk.

That is what I do in my paintings.

I tell a story, short and simple,

true and sincere,

devoid of flowery language

and superfluous words.

I speak softly,

lose control from time to time,

and under it all simmers a nagging murmur of unrest peculiar to homes that are allegedly normative but in which “the gray suffering of their residents is initially not apparent and requires deciphering” (according to the linguist Rubik Rosenthal). If speech is hurtful I’m downcast and if embarrassing – I look away or put on a mask. I never seek other surroundings or tell tales of sensational events.

We are so familiar with all the things that exist here and now in our close surroundings that they are taken for granted, sometimes not worth a second look, certainly not worth painting…freezing moments devoid of splendor yet, in my view, sufficiently important for me to paint them bustling with life…glorifying them, bringing them to the forefront and highlighting them. With no cynicism or overt criticism .I am  “celebrating” the injury.

And, like in expressionism that has brought to the fore the underdog, the anti-hero, the weakling, the lonely, the afflicted and the injured – I gaze and peep at people living their life on the margins, imbedded in a concrete expanse, situated in a personal limbo, lacking facial details and imbued with low-level and anti-heroic prosaic features. I gaze at the backs of the painting’s.  subjects .Are they avoiding looking back at me? Are they aware of the gaze?

My peeping into their intimate privacy turns out to be an impossible contemplation. It does not toe the line and engenders disarray instead. It is concurrently treacherous and loyal, abiding by the law while drifting transgressively between the particular and the collective. It remains uncommitted to the look and creates a disproportionate world because this is the power of painting – to contemplate the core of the experience in order to cause its aberrations to resonate.

Unconsciously, my biographical background has seeped into my work. It turns out that the scars remaining within me have struck notes of melancholy also in my work. It portrays weary men in spots of picturesque space emphasizing bodily gestures on the drama of facial expression. My father, is a painterly face code that appears and resonates in the parade of men taking on his image under my gaze and hugging themselves while confined within a world of their own personal limbo.