My paintings engage with local architectural motifs present in the cityscape and found everywhere.

My practice engages with building entrance design, motifs repeated in thousands of private homes and public buildings. I paint exotic potted plants and stone surfaces in stairwells and lobbies, marble expanses, walls, floors, elevators, and waiting rooms.

The works explore architectural design bearing local markers of exhibitionism and grotesque display. In practice, my paintings engage in the banal and familiar, addressing the dominant, prevalent architectural language. Its elements are expressed in imagery of marble, the monotone, hard material as it glows with light, ranging from shiny to matte. I turn to the dialectic tension between high and low, grand and fake. “High” Old World materials such as marble, are now manufactured artificially, and are quite prevalent, as are their visual representations. The bright light in paintings from the past as signifying the Israeli sun is now fluorescent lighting processed in Photoshop.

My paintings are deliberately not realistic; the images have been processed to leave them devoid of spirit. I depict a world empty of human beings, not to give pleasure but to present an ironic world of marble, gleam, banality, and death. The “a-realism” is achieved through my technique: what seems free of any personal touch is actually a restrained, controlled technique aiming to transform matter into idea.

My oeuvre developed from knowledge of the art world and the encounter between the language of hyperrealism with the sights I saw during my youth in Kiryat Ekron and the aesthetics I observed there. As an adult, I searched for my art pathway and studied figurative drawing. Already as a student at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem (2000-2004) I was seeking a way to express references to my home but also to the fantasies of luxury of the nouveaux riche in the making. Later, when working in Herzliya Pituah, I saw that this type of aesthetics was also found in the area considered the most prestigious in the country.

My paintings became not only about central Israel but also about the periphery, since the basis of my discourse on Israeli taste is linked to the lack of proportion, and to the difference between glorification touching upon the sublime and exhibitionism leaning towards the grotesque. I try to “capture” the abstract space, to depict overdone and bad taste while emphasizing marble’s macabre associations to gravestones, casting the shadow of its intense sadness over Israeli banality.

There is an additional element at the seamline between the essence of my work and technique: in many cases, I photograph the image from a low viewpoint, with the effect of aggrandizing the object. This is my guiding viewpoint as an artist, adding an ironic level to observation of the painting, a viewpoint capable of seeing human nature with all the heartbreaking contrasts directing it.