Cerasoli Gallery
Culver City, CA
8/22/09
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Cerasoli Gallery presents an exhibition of works by Roy Nachum, which will open starting August 22nd and will remain open until September 16th. The opening reception for the public is Saturday, August 22nd from 6-9 P.M.
Roy Nachum’s texturized, surrealist paintings are scaled to life size but his images resist the conventions reality imposes on both wilderness and civilization. Partially nude women crouch next to kneeling elephants to peer into their eyes and stroke their nubile trunks. A boy, blinded by the heavy crown which has slipped over his ears to cover his eyes, runs through a house of mirrors with a red balloon tied to his wrist. Nachum’s photo-real figures inhabiting fantastic worlds are overlaid with a texture of raised ‘pixels’ of paint, each one painstakingly hand-made by the artist. The result of this unexpected topography is a feeling of glimpsing a stranger’s dirty little secrets through an inky, rain-spotted windowpane or finding pages torn from a book of exotica, left outside to decompose like so many dead leaves and abandoned desires. Perhaps intended to serve as a kind of mirror caught between two worlds, Nachum’s geometrically patterned paint daubs reflect the atomic building blocks of life while mimicking the tell-tale thumbprint of a digital printer. The viewer instinctively draws in for a closer inspection and is reminded of the abstraction which exists behind our veil of reality. This duality goes beyond the canvas’ surface quality, revealing itself in Nachum’s mix of the imaginary world and real life, memories and fantasies, found in his startling, dreamlike imagery.

Explorations of submergence and emergence, naivete and maturity, the real and unreal, Nachum’s paintings invite the viewer into a dualistic experience combining the virtual and psychic in a single, focused, artful moment.
Nachum is also well known for his work as an interior designer, which has appeared in restaurants, nightclubs, and hotels in the United States and Europe, including Club Door, TAO Nightclub at The Venetian in Las Vegas, Cafe Bari,SoHo, 1Oak, Lower Manhattan, Southern Hospitality and Destino both Upper East Side owned by Justin Timberlake. Educated in Jerusalem at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and New York City’s Cooper Union, Nachum is interested in recreating psychological turning points in his subjects’ lives with a cinematic sense of framing movement and emotion. Currently living and working in New York City, Nachum’s work has been exhibited in France, Israel, and the United States, and collected by prominent art collectors, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Timberlake.

For more info go to: www.cerasoligallery.com