Patina of Paint Pixels

When ‘Prophecy’ opened at the Cerasoli gallery in Culver City I wasn’t sure what to expect. This was to be Roy Nachum’s first show in Los Angeles and quite frankly I wasn’t too familiar with him. He was born and raised in Jerusalem and attended art academy, then spent three years in the army before moving to New York where he’s been living and working ever since. He’s had a number of solo shows in NYC and France, but so far nothing on the west coast and to be perfectly honest the stuff I had seen didn’t really impress me that much. A bunch of allegorical figurative surrealism I thought. The naked lady is being chased by a bird while an elephant stands in a tree, I get it.

Turns out Nachum had a trick up his sleeve I wasn’t really expecting: the actual experience of the art.

There are a number of times in my life where I can think back and recall times where I’ve stood in front of a canvas and been struck by how differently I’d see the picture if I didn’t see the deep brush strokes or seen how the grain of a wooden panel gave an image added tension or movement. Many times in art there’s no substitute for the experience of standing in a room in front of the work, and ‘Prophecy’ certainly qualifies as one of those times.

Walking into the gallery is the visual equivalent of a sudden fanfare, one with big brassy horns and maybe even a boy’s choir. The canvases are immense, the figures stand before you life-sized and larger, the aforementioned elephants surge from mountain pools. The mythic subject matter, the gray shades, the lushly detailed figurative elements and swaths of intense red all begin to make sense in this scale. Hawks, crowns, martyr’s blood, cherubs, horses and immaculate nudes done in detailed and fluid photorealistic oils made much more sense looming over me in their thunderous magnitude. What before seemed just an illustration in my art journal became the soundtrack for an adventure movie and with the epic dimensions of the pieces themselves, walking amongst the canvases felt as though one had just entered a world that had all the same symbols but a totally different history.

In addition to scale, Nachum provides the eye with a detail whose depth is missed entirely by even the highest resolution photographs: the paint pixels.

Running in perfectly even columns and rows along the canvas the artist has sculpted small squares of paint about the size of a dime which rise about two millimeters off the canvas. They’re hard to notice from far away but as one approaches the painting the squares of pigment give the images a pixelated patina, updating the ancient dream-like themes with a digital logic that seems as hard wired to us as cell phones.

A topless Asian woman shushes us as she’s flanked by white stallions and there’s an intense red that’s been brushed over her face and hands in Silence of Silence. In False Affection a young woman stands holding the string to a red balloon as hawks swoop around her and a young boy is pulling a red thread taut that runs between the woman’s legs. The loss of virginity is an ancient theme but as you move past the image it morphs and shifts not organically but mechanically, a striking contrast between subject matter and technique.

‘Prophecy’ runs through September 16th at Cerasoli Gallery.