Nir Hod
b. 1970

b. 1970

Love Story, 1997, Oil on canvas, 179X154 cm. Signed.

Nir Hod is a missionary of beauty. Fame and loneliness, heroism, youth, glamour and death are served up in his work in heaping doses. The heroes and heroines in his paintings – most of whom are cast in his own image – play parts in a grandiose, imaginary melodrama that belongs to the realms of eternity, mythology and fairy tales. The world depicted in his paintings appears as if it truly belongs to the young. His beautiful, glorified heroes never sweat or emit body odors. Nor will they ever grow old. Even in death, their beauty will remain pure, untouchable and untarnished. The glamour parcel that Hod presents to the viewer in a saccharine-sweet, ostentatious cellophane wrapper reveals itself to be a capsule filled with emotion, passion and death, which challenges ideas about beauty in the era after modernism.

Numerous texts have been written about the decisive change in artistic discourse in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. Commentators have announced the end of the age of irony, cynicism and sophistication, which ruled the art world of the 1990s and conditioned its suspicious, hostile attitude toward anything associated with emotion and beauty. One could attribute this change to the so-called eternal pendulum of art history – oscillating endlessly between emotion and intellect – or to yet another shift in cultural trends...In Hod’s work as well, the Forever series of paintings marks a fundamental change. The humor, cynicism and irony that were typical of his paintings during the 1990s seem to have given way to a melancholy state of mind that truly seeks to reawaken authentic sentiment. Hod endeavors, as he phrases it, to reach out to people‘s hearts, and “to strike the dormant cord of love.” He strives to reintroduce feeling into a cold and alienated world, to reawaken our sense of wonderment and to impart a feeling of comfort and solace (or, in his own words, “to show people the sun in the middle of the night”).

In the early 1990s, after two decades dominated by a restrained, intentionally frugal aesthetic tradition and by the consecration of intellectual, anti-narrative values, Hod’s appearance on the Israeli art scene was a refreshing and much-called-for change. The controversial and provocative nature of his work, as well as his glamorous beauty and his ambivalent gender appearance, positioned him as a rebellious outsider. As someone who refused to abide by the rules of the conservative, elitist canon dictated by the melancholic asceticism and material sparseness that constituted the dominant Israeli aesthetic, he was considered the enfant terrible of the local art scene. His narcissism, his glorification of beauty, his attraction to the twilight zones of kitsch and camp, and, of course, his penchant for publicity soon made him a hero of unprecedented scale in the Israeli art world. For many, Hod was an Israeli version of a “total artist” – an exhibitionist dandy á la Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons, a previously unfamiliar phenomenon in Israeli culture.

One may say that Hod’s painting technique itself has served him all along as part of the overall strategy and message of his paintings: “I like toying with the scope of painterly possibilities in order to convey different feelings: I can engage in refined oil painting to portray one theme, and use the kind of ‘bad painting’ you see in tacky Indian film posters to depict another subject,” he says. Indeed, at times it is sufficient to identify the source of the painterly practice Hod engages with in order to understand the irony or playful allusion he creates regarding the depicted subject. Thus, for example, in the painting Love Story (1997), which depicts a pair of lovers in the midst of war (where the artist himself plays both partners), as well as in Tears have No God (2002) – an oil painting on canvas featuring a female Israeli officer leaning compassionately over the figure of an Arab man lying wounded at her feet – the quality of the brushstrokes alone is enough to grasp the painting’s rhetoric: the technique of “bad painting“ Hod employs here generates the saccharine-sweet, romantic atmosphere and the understanding that such a scene can occur only on canvas.

The bulk of Hod’s works, especially those created in post-9/11 New York, transpire on the axis between life and death (“In order to talk about life, one has to talk about death,” as he puts it.) His heroes are forever young, fresh and beautiful. Some are even young children or adolescent girls. Love will Keep Us Foreverdepicts the artist’s head resting on a flowerbed, and a beautiful girl (his sister) kissing him goodbye on the forehead. The composition of the original photograph is based on photographs of shahids (Arabic for martyrs), “which I also wanted to beautify,” says Hod. In all of his paintings death wears a young, glamorous, romantic mask. It is impeccable death, unsoiled by even a hint of feebleness, decay or degeneration. “Even the blood in my works is not dirty; it is blood that emanates from a broken heart, from unrealized love, suffering and prohibition,” he says. “In the series Forever I wanted to convey a religious feeling similar to paintings of the Deposition. I wanted to illustrate the moment when the soul leaves the young body. The butterflies and flowers highlight the presence of death in a world of youth cut short.” The monumental dimensions of the paintings contribute to the experiential effect. “I wanted the viewer to be able to smell the figures, to listen to their last breaths,” he says.

Tamy Katz Freiman, Nir Hod: An Acrobat of Emotion in the Circus of Illusions, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, March 2005