Nephilim

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Exposition held at The Artists` House of Jerusalem in August-September, 2021.  Curator Galit Semel

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Omer`s works arouse a feeling of excess.  The viewer is flooded by a sense of continuous eruption.  Omer is a total artist.  In his studio his works pile up, every corner is crowded by painted canvases and paper sheets.  Omer is a captive of his artistic work, which cannot but seem herculean to the observer. 

His mental world is a flood of stimuli, which would overpower him, if he couldn`t give them order and balance.  “In a painting everything must be in its right place” he says.  However, the moment of quiet thus achieved is transient and fragile.  The ground on which he stands is rendered shaky by the onslaught of images.  The order he succeeds in creating is partial and unsteady.  Tomorrow he will have to start again.  Every day is an attempt to stay afloat amid the engulfing waves.  Every person and situation he encounters in daily life is a source of threat and confusion, which peremptorily demands to be deciphered.  For this reason he feels compelled to paint the same figures again and again.  Some of the characters portrayed in “Nephilim” were painted by him over 40 times.  Like the sphinx, each new encounter poses to him the demand “solve me, unravel me!” 

His “Nephilim” is a portrayal of this continuous struggle.  The figures are oversized, both spatially and emotionally. Many of them pose riddles.  In his picture “The Birth of Venus” there are three riddles: 1.  Why is this the birth of Venus? 2. Who is the male (or bisexual) figure at its center? 3. Who are the two strange votaries of this Venus?  Noam’ riddle-making points the way to his sources, his inner mythology, his models and his life mentors.

The exposition is built of two rooms.  A large one with oversized paintings and a small one with painted ceramics.  The figures painted on porcelain plates belong clearly to the same world as their titanic counterparts. However, in this room they are “domesticated”, so as to fit into the circular frames of the plates.  The Nephilim lived before Noam`s flood.  The ones that appear on the smaller room suggest that some may have survived, after being tamed.  In this form they can even adorn the dinner table.

 

From the text to the show “Nephilim” by Galit Semel

 

[1] The “Nephilim” are mentioned in the book of Genesis, 6:1-4).  They are giants or titans born of the “sons of the gods” and “the daughters of Adam”.