Nir Hod is a missionary of beauty. Fame and loneliness, heroism, youth, glamour and death are served up in his work in heaping doses. The heroes and heroines in his paintings – most of whom are cast in his own image – play parts in a grandiose, imaginary melodrama that belongs to the realms of eternity, mythology and fairy tales. The world depicted in his paintings appears as if it truly belongs to the young. His beautiful, glorified heroes never sweat or emit body odors, nor will they ever grow old. Even in death, their beauty will remain pure, untouchable and untarnished.
The glamour parcel that Hod presents to the viewer in a saccharine-sweet, ostentatious cellophane wrapper reveals itself to be a capsule filled with emotion, passion and death, which challenges ideas about beauty in the era after modernism.
On April 27th, 2007, galerie davide gallo has the pleasure of presenting the first European solo show of the Israeli artist Nir Hod. In his last series of paintings, the artist resumes and emphasizes topics that he previously began in his artistic career.
“Soldiers”, a series presented in its entirety in 2005 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv deals with the themes of beauty, death, sacrifice, and youth, themes already clear and perfectly developed in his work. In this new series of paintings, Nir Hod concentrates on the feminine identity
“Farewell Sofia”, a painting representing a dog, shows the absence of the woman, standing for melancholy and separation. “Soldier in Sinai” is a painting which incorporates all the themes of Nir Hod. The topic of sacrifice and death as a consequence of war is emphasized with greater determination.
“Two Girls” is a hymn to love and intimacy, feminine identity from another painterly perspective filled with irony and poetical desecration. “Masturbation” is a work in which the artist reaches a rare technical perfection. The perspective and the asymmetrical cut are the true protagonists of the painting. The joy, the ambiguity of pleasure and the recurring ambiguity of the line between death and sleep, and between life and dream constitute the nucleus center as well as the poetry of Nir Hod.
“Mother and I” refers to childhood as lost mythology, a romantic dream. In this work there is also an underlying ambiguity: the realism of the description and the irrealism of the subject and of the space that encircles it.
The landscape is like that in a fable, the intimate serenity of the emotional dialogue between mother and son set against the nearly scientific analysis of visual data which gets lost in an infinite game of details
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