I Had a Bug: Gili Lev Ari

Gili Lev Ari was born in 1978 and lives and works in Tel Aviv. She has always been drawn to classical painting and European aesthetics. She paints oil paintings on canvas in a figurative-realist style, in small to medium formats, with meticulous finish and vivid colors. At the center of her work are not the painting itself or its formal elements, but rather the narrative, the selection of images, and the act of appropriating them.

Her works engage with self-aware kitsch, combining humor, suggested sexuality, and an image of lighthearted yet slightly macabre femininity. The images appearing in her paintings include sweets, decorative objects, and toys, among them miniature skulls sold in craft stores or “everything for a dollar” stores. She chooses to place ornamental objects such as scented soaps and decorative items on shiny satin fabrics, thereby creating a fun, synthetic, inexpensive world that she paints using a traditional, meticulous technique regarded as “high technique.” The many hours invested in the painting process emphasize the tension between the object and the way it is represented, while simultaneously granting it a new status and elevating it.

In Lev Ari’s view, the selection of objects and their placement alongside one another resembles an act of miniature curatorship. She assembles for herself a kind of pictorial “jewelry box”: a collection of beautiful, glittering, childish, and slightly foolish things that entice the viewer and awaken the desire to look, covet, and appropriate. The works are influenced by Dutch vanitas paintings, which create an illusory and seductive beauty alongside a sense of transience, decay, and the understanding that everything is fleeting—vanity of vanities. At the same time, Lev Ari is influenced by Pop Art and its engagement with the status of “low” objects and subjects within high culture, as well as with the blurring of boundaries between the everyday and inexpensive and the sublime. Her sources of inspiration include artists from the 1960s, among them Wayne Thiebaud and Claes Oldenburg, as well as contemporary artists such as Will Cotton and David LaChapelle. Another source of inspiration is the aesthetic world of contemporary pop culture: the polished and bombastic music videos of stars such as Madonna, Beyoncé, Britney Spears, and Lady Gaga; reality and trash programs on the E! channel; and inexpensive fashion intended for the masses. This world, saturated with advertisements and enticing, miniature images—foremost among them the images appearing on Instagram—arouses a constant desire for luxury, appropriation, adornment, and a sense of wealth that never reaches fulfillment.

Her paintings therefore also address the longing for decorative objects and luxuries that embody an ideal of beauty while simultaneously containing the potential for death. Beauty is not presented as something merely innocent, but as a seductive force that is also artificial, excessive, fleeting, and at times macabre.

In contrast to the density and overload with which objects usually appear in consumer and everyday spaces, Lev Ari isolates them and grants them an almost ritual presence. On the canvas, they become objects of contemplation, desire, and wonder. Reality briefly changes its pace, and an atmosphere of quiet, intimacy, attraction, and seduction emerges. Through painting, she seeks to make viewers covet and wish to appropriate both the works and the objects depicted in them—just as she herself seeks to appropriate and covet everything beautiful, glittering, childish, and slightly foolish.

Edited by: Dr. Amit Kama