At first sight Omer's paintings awaken a feeling of bewilderment.  The unceasing torrent of stimuli allows us a blink into the painter's engulfing inner reality.  The observer may lose his footing, imagining what it means to be submerged in such a world.

The abundance of detail creates an overload that entraps and intrigues. The thick texture of lines and stains fills the canvas to overflowing. The brush strokes are thickly crowded, creating an explosive dynamic that exposes the critical condition of the characters.   

In the periods in which these works were created, Omer focused almost exclusively on large monochromatic canvases. The many shades of black and grey engender infinite tonalities, at once dissonant and harmonic. One could almost say he does not need to use colors in order to make colored paintings. 

There is a bouncing and frenetic quality to these works.  Figure and ground seem to change places, feeding and devouring each other. The figures continuously dissolve into the background or seem to be re-born out of it, in a kind of repetition compulsion or eternal return.

The heroes of this personal mythology are in constant transformation. The works are filled with a mysterious symbolism, which wavers between the tragic and the grotesque, the rational and the absurd.  Some of the characters seem caught in the attempt to cross over from one dimension to another. Some are specters; others are mutilated, or cut off.  The missing part seems to be still in the other dimension, from which they are trying to emerge.  

In this whirlpool things often become their contrary.  Thus in the "Annunciation", the angel of the traditional iconography becomes a very fat hovering woman, while the virgin, who should be the addressee of the angel's message, here appears as a perplexed male, deeply plunged in his own obsessive thoughts. This fluid world reminds us of Zygmunt Bauman's 1 "liquid reality", a concept that aimed to characterize the post-modern experience, in which the social and cultural coordinates keep changing continuously. The dizziness engendered by such a liquid-reality corresponds well with Omer's distressful perpetual mobile. 

The sense of mutual absorption between the figures and the background is the central theme of "Deep Sea", where a menacing group seems about to close upon the central figure (the sea-captain?), while the waves of the surrounding sea seem about to close upon the menacing group.  There is no inkling of stability in view.  Everything flows.

Omer's characters seem to exist in mythological time, a time that never was and therefore always is.  Though the figures often lack a stable contour, each painting creates its own crystalized reality, where the vortex gains a pictorial permanence.

The stories that Noam has spun around his "muses" have their origin in various artistic, literary and mythological sources. One of his chief muses is the painter Lucian Freud. Quite a few references to Freud are hidden in the present show.  Other artists are also ensconced between the waves, such as Da Vinci and van Gogh (who are homaged in Noam's obsession with eddies), William Blake with his crazy world (where the Artist-Adam crawls on all fours to collect some crumbs of inspiration from the muse that's stand upon him like a domina, and Edvard Munch, whose melancholia seems to pervade Omer's defeated heroes to the marrow.  

The characters reflect Omer's interest in the epic and legendary.  His Hamlet is a human torch who kindles a fire that swallows up the classical buildings of the realm.  Omer's homage to Shakespeare continues with McBeth, King Lear, Lear's fool, and Falstaff.  Shakespeare's tragic and grotesque heroes, who are often hurled or shipwrecked into the stage of life, are fitting inhabitants of Omer's art.  They tell us of his view of the artist as a paradoxical figure, a prophetic anti-hero, at once sovereign and submissive, wallowing and glorying in the enforced message he is obliged to bear.  

Viewing those pictures requires from us an inner pause, an effort at contemplation and reflexion. They demand the viewer to position himself at a distance and then closer up.  Those absorbing works indicate that painting is Omer's life mission, to which he totally consecrates his time, energy and heart.  

1  Zygmunt Bauman's , Liquid Modernity, Polity Publisher, 2000.

Noam Omer (born 1982) lives and creates at Hod Hasharon. He finished the Beit Berl Art Seminar with distinction (2007) and won the Young Artists' Israel Prize (2017).  His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Israel and the world, such as: the Kibbutz Gallery (Tel-Aviv), Midrashah Gallery (Tel-Aviv), Eretz Israel Museum (Tel-Aviv), Yanko-Dada Museum (Eyn Hod), Kayma Galery (Jaffa), Gal-On Gallery (Tel-Aviv), Triangle Art Space (Tel-Aviv), Tova Osman Gallery, Museum of Dr. Ghislain (Belgium), Kolvenburg Museum (Germany),  On –Off Gallery (Germany), Hala C Gallery (Prague) and more.