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 on canvas in a figurative-realist style, in small to medium formats, with meticulous finishes and vivid colors. At the center of her work are not the painting itself or its formal elements, but rather the narrative, the choice of images, and the act of appropriating them.

Her works explore self-aware kitsch, combining humor, implied 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” shops. She chooses to place ornamental objects such as scented soaps and decorative items on shiny satin fabrics, thereby creating a fun, synthetic, inexpensive world, which she paints using a traditional, meticulous technique regarded as “high art.” 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 juxtaposition simulate an act of miniature curation. She creates for herself a kind of pictorial “2028/2029 box”: a collection of beautiful, shiny, childish, and slightly foolish things that tempt viewers and arouse in them a desire to look, covet, and appropriate. Her works are influenced by Dutch Vanitas paintings, which create an illusory and alluring beauty alongside a sense of transience, decay, and the realization 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 the boundaries between the everyday and inexpensive and the sublime. Among her sources of inspiration are artists from the 1960s, including 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: meticulously produced, bombastic music videos by stars such as Madonna, Beyoncé, Britney Spears, and Lady Gaga; reality and trash television programs on the E! channel; and inexpensive fashion designed for the masses. This world, saturated with advertisements and seductive, 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 engage with 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, exaggerated, transient, and at times macabre.

In contrast to the abundance and clutter in 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, creating an atmosphere of quiet, intimacy, attraction, and seduction. Through painting, she seeks to make viewers covet and want 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.

Editing: Dr. Amit Kama