LLEI D'ART 13

Yigal Ozeri andMimesis The Israeli painter Yigal Ozeri (Tel Aviv, 1958), currently resident in New York, has captivated a large part of the art world thanks to the incredible technical quality of his hyper- realisticartworks.Although itmightnotseem itonfirstview,his recreationsmix together reality and fantasy, takingpreviously prepared photographic shots back to his Long Island studio to create his compositions, which are usually female figures that remind us of photograms taken on beautiful natural backdrops. He admits to using digital and video photography to create his work so that he can then project the image and paint it using the photograph as a reference. As the artist himself states, moving from painting the model directly to using photographic representations has given him much more freedom to work, allowing him to focus on the detail and to use finer brushes. Thisprocess has graduallydevelopedover a decade, after which the artist has devoted himself almost exclusively to young female figures. This has allowed him to coax out their shyness, their insecurity, their openness or their embarrassment through a generous and wide selection of poses, some of themborderingon themannered. The artist admits to being profoundly influenced by the iridescentpainting typicalof thePre-Raphaelites,burstingwith literary references and committed to nature; he is, however, a painter of amore sensual style, of impeccableaesthetics that uses a certain subtlety and restrained eroticism to confront real and imagined beauty upon a backdrop of carefully selected, highly suggestivebackgrounds. Foto/ Photo J.M.Miranda. 29