6th Exhibition in the 17th Nidbach series: I Still Haven’t Painted Myself with the New Glasses…

Shlomi Lellouche is a figurative painter, who until now, usually created paintings and drawings of self portraits. However, alongside these self portraits, landscapes and interiors became a subject of study for the artist as well. The valley landscapes, the ravens, the beetroots, the pomegranates and the garlic – which dried out in its tormented position as model – become kinds of self portraits themselves.

For Lellouche, realism is an act of transformation, a means of converting weakness to strength and the illusion of vision to the substantiality of painting. Thus, alongside the poetic-melancholic atmosphere present in his works, one can detect the strong brutality, which exists in the penetrating look, in the uncomplimentary posture, the non-compromising gesture, the bright redness, open mouth and the shiny artist’s knife. The difficulty, the pain and the beauty are physical and concrete in his paintings. The same tension is seen in the pallet, which is rich with restraint and full of intermediate tones, in search of aggressive brush strokes over aesthetics.

Shlomi Lellouche’s works are motivated by the tension between the lack of realization in the single image and the desire to receive it through the next painting. Each piece of work is a form of new glasses that have not been drawn yet.