Israel Dror Hemed, "Profile" 2018

Israel Dror Hemed

"Profile" 2018

Israel Dror Hemed A young and promising Israeli painter who has had a solo exhibition for six months at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, add his works to your art collection

Oil on canvas
36/46 cm
signed

Israel Dror Hemed's solo exhibition "Painter-Collection" at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art curated by Ruthi Director
Israel Dror Hemed (born 1975), winner of the Haim Schiff Prize for Realistic Figurative Art for 2020, acquired his training in painting during three years of study with the artist Maya Cohen-Levy. At the center of his painting are figures of men, sometimes looking directly at the viewer, but usually turning their gaze away from the viewer onwards, self-contained, immersed in their world. He meets most of the men that Hemed draws by chance, asks their permission to photograph them, and then paints according to the photographs. Within the familiar practice of painting according to a photograph, he actually gives the painting a principled position, which redeems the human figure (the male, in this case) from the saturation of countless photographed images. Gently, he links the eroticism of the very act of painting to the objects of his gaze.
Hemed's starting point when he came to the painting - a figurative painting of characters from life, was doomed to take into account the history of the genre and its ancestors; The aura of oil painting and the criticism leveled at it, in retrospect, for colonialism, capitalism and chauvinism; And the place filled by the new figurative painting in the complex politics of identities. Hemed arrives at the painting equipped with great admiration for the greats of the painting, humility in relation to his own place, and a strong desire for the act of painting itself. Recognizing the value of the arena into which he enters, he looks presently at its main actors - no less than Caravaggio, Sergeant, Cezanne, Mana and Hockney, and tries to pour into it, quietly and without declaration, a dimension of contemporaneity and a voice of its own.
He photographs the objects of his gaze on the telephone, or in a small pocket camera, and transfers the digital image to an oil portrait on canvas, sometimes life-size, sometimes above life-size. At the base of the making are in love - with the act of painting, and with the objects of the gaze. This is how his motivation can be understood as he stretches the glimpse of photography, and pauses the duration of his - his, ours - observation of the cartoon character. The pause creates a new space of looks and relationships, in which all those involved in the arena of observation - the model, the painter and the viewer - take part. Faced with the immediacy, cheapness, and endless saturation of digital images, the slow, traditional, and in love painting offers itself as a space of grace.
Between the hidden or direct gazes of the cartoon characters, the space in which Hemed places his heroes, in front of his viewers, crystallizes: between provocation and avoidance. The act of painting appears to be a silent opposition to belligerent positions wherever they are, to a worn-out dichotomy between female and male, and to a narrow conception of what is contemporary. It offers the traditional as a way to break conventions.