TEL AVIV—I met Eran Reshef, winner of the Shiff Prize for realistic painting, in his studio on the third floor of an old building in Tel Aviv, Israel.
At the entrance, I couldn’t help noticing the objects standing in the corners of the room—I recognized them as the models I saw a few days earlier in the paintings of his solo exhibit at the Tel Aviv Museum.
Now they were in his studio, standing without light or glamour. “I don’t have anything to do with them anymore,” Reshef said. He directed his eyes toward his new finding, his next subject of painting—an old Amkor fridge standing in the middle of the room.
Under Reshef’s brush, the objects receive life and a presence of their own. An old cooler against a peeling wall, a gas bottle on tiles perfectly painted, a cactus in a planter—those are supposedly the subjects of his paintings, but something stronger is passing through.
It seems as if Reshef does not want to reflect a mental state but a poetical complexity. His realistic paintings full with light skillfully portray in a wonderful exactitude everyday life situations, which he directs.
