Yigal Ozeri’s work deals with perception, and in this body of work, he is exploring the fine line between photography and painting. The challenge for him is bringing the paintings closer to life than the photographs. Ozeri uses photography in order to erase it. His process illustrates the evolution of his approach. 

 

The initial stage, and the foundation of what Ozeri builds, is photographing the model in nature. He’s not a photographer by trade, he simply “uses the technology,” as he puts it. Later, he uploads the images and blends his recollections of the model’s performance with the digital images he sees. Within this digital space he creates a new image and, by doing so, erases the photograph. The more he progresses with the painting—from his signature blurry background to the portrait itself—the entire process becomes a recreation of a new portrait, again erasing the previous one. The more the painting advances, it becomes a 3-dimensional illusion and its realistic strength leaves the photograph as a flat expression, thus erasing it’s power. 

 

The desire for photographers to be painters and vise versa is a large misperception: in many instances, photographers who want to explore other realms take a photo and add pictorial elements via editing software, bringing their photographs closer to paintings; many photo-realistic painters oftentimes paint frozen moments resembling still life. Ozeri’s painting constructs the sense that the portrait is alive. The smell of nature, the movement of the wind, the painting conveys the music of that moment, creating a dialogue. Ozeri paints the feminine form as slipping away from photo reality and into a fantasy. His work portrays people living in nature without malice, and that is what is most important to him, and perhaps more radical than the current trend for glamorized violence and destruction. Illustrated by the visceral imagery of dreamscapes, his paintings permeate a desire to capture the space between the physical and abstract, a gap in time equivalent to a complete celebration of the physical form married to nature. 

 

Ozeri has been widely exhibited internationally since 1988. His solo exhibitions have included those in Tokyo, Munich, New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Basel, Vienna, Israel, Paris, Tel Aviv, Mexico, Salzburg, Madrid, Peru, London, San Francisco and Hong Kong. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), the McNay Art Museum (TX), The Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Tel Aviv), the Albertina Museum (Vienna), the Museum of Modern Art (Haifa), the Nerman Museum (MO), the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (NY), the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (LA), the Kennedy Center for the Arts (D.C.) and the New York Public Library (NY), among others. Ozeri lives and works in New York City, NY.