The paintings above are a selection from my paintings from the years 2019-2023

The first 10 paintings are based on photographs most of which were taken by my wife, the artist Lena Zidel, at exhibition openings and other festive events and uploaded to social networks. In the era of social networks where everyone takes pictures of everything, a lot, everywhere and at any time and the mind cannot contain the incessant stream of images, I suggest the opposite move: choosing meaningful images for me from the flow, another look at me and the people close to me, stopping, pausing, processing, observing .

In a painting in the studio (2022): I appear on the wall behind photographs that are the sources of inspiration for my work, including a self-portrait of Uri Raisman, a photograph of my daughter Neta and more. Selfie 3 (2019): drawn after a photograph by the artist Lucy Alkiviti – Lena takes a picture at the opening of an art event at Beit HaSofar, Tel Aviv, December 4, 2018, me on her left, artists Yossi Waxman, Noli Omar and Israel Dror-Hamad on her right. Selfie 4 (2019): drawn following the photograph taken by Lena and described in Selfie 3. In the drawing we are (2019): Lena, my wife, Neta my daughter and I appear, following a photograph taken by our friend, the artist Max Epstein at my birthday party in our home, Jerusalem, August 2018. The drawings Itzik (2019), Ofer (2019), Neta (2021), Max (2021), Boris (2020), Shai (2021), are portraits of friends, mostly artists, and relatives based on photographs Lena took.

The following 10 paintings are based on photographs from the family photo albums. Flipping through the albums following my father’s death from Corona about two years ago as part of the mourning work, the fondness for the memories and the fear of their disappearance led me to create this series. The photographs in the album commemorate events in the family’s life. The photographers had no artistic pretensions and the photographs have something very deep, exciting and authentic for me. The photo shoot then was a rare and festive event. The photographs recorded events in the family’s life as the family members wanted them to remember. The photographs I chose as a starting point for my paintings reveal intimate and meaningful moments for me in the biography of my family and myself, including:

Bar Mitzvah (2021): My Bar Mitzvah celebration, Jerusalem, 1973.

Jerusalemites by the sea (2021): My grandparents with my father, six-year-old Ephraim and his four-year-old brother, Rishon Lezion, 1943.

The first day (2022): following a photo taken by my father at the entrance to our house on Tel Hai Street, me before the first day of second grade and my sister Yali before the first day of kindergarten, Jerusalem, 1967.

Purim at Gan Sima 1 and 2 (2022): Purim party at the kindergarten, I am dressed as a rabbit, Jerusalem, 1963.

Through the painting I strive to say something beyond what the photograph conveys, for me it is an act of freedom in which I unfold the importance of the festive moments, stretch the boundaries of realistic painting and create scenes that have humor and exaggeration. The colors are intensified and reinvented, the spaces and the proportions change, and the design of the characters becomes concise and sometimes grotesque.