Noam Omer: Nephilim

 At first glance, Noam Omer's works elicit an experience of excess: a surplus of images, an inundation, flood, eruption, visual blast, a congestion of lines referring to lines, stains referring to stains. Omer is a total artist: piles of works in oil, watercolor, ink, and charcoal fill his studio, attesting to an artist who invests his himself wholly in artistic practice; an artist who is trapped in his thoughts, but finds refuge transferring them to the canvas or paper.

The works consist of systems of symbols incomprehensible to the viewer, hence disconcerting. The constant oscillation between the tragic and the mundane, the absurd and the logical, underlies his oeuvre at large, lending it its unique character.

The works on view address a tragic-grotesque experience of existence. Threatening hints hover over unconventional figures, depicted as Nephilim—gigantic creatures with a distorted shape, subjected to various states of threat, calling to mind end situations. The threat distorts the figures, causing them to lose their balanced appearance and become caricatures of themselves. Growing ugly, they expose inhuman aspects.

Omer's figures lead one to distant worlds with hidden historical dimensions. The works blend different representations of time, striving for simultaneity; a new, virtual time, transpiring in no place, furnishing a sense of a common cybernetic space, combined with the act of creation and observation. The works shift between reality and imagination, between the physical space in which they were created and the symbolic space of perception represented in them.

The exhibition's second room, featuring painted bowls, attempts to provide a framework and a boundary to contain his menacing figures. The figures, style, and overabundance originate in the same world of titans, but here they are placed in a limited, restrictive frame and take on a near-decorative quality; as if the monster can be tamed, and even put on the table.