‘I am not painting the flowers,” insisted David Nipo. “I am painting my field of vision. My field of vision itself. If we allow ourselves for a moment not to see the things in the field of vision, but rather to see the field of vision as an abstract array of light stimulation.”
It is a statement that goes to the heart of Nipo’s new exhibition, And Love, What will become of it? currently on view at Rothschild Fine Art in Tel Aviv. The show, a joint presentation with his wife, poet Adina Nipo, brings together his hyper-realistic still lifes and her precise, searching texts, two different responses to intimacy, loss, and the act of observing.
To stand before Nipo’s canvases is to encounter intimacy in several overlapping forms. There is the obsessive, durational intimacy between painter and subject; the quieter intimacy between a husband and wife; and the immediate intimacy created between painting and viewer.
Looking at the translucent folds of his white and pink lisianthus, or the heavy, bruised presence of the gourds in the exhibition’s title work, And Love, What will become of it?, one is drawn into a sustained attention to looking itself, to perception, to the act of holding a gaze for long enough that it begins to change.
“Intimate, certainly,” said David Nipo. “There is nothing in it but intimacy, and intimacy is not narrative. Intimacy is not something you can turn into a story, unless you really insist on it. I am not looking for narratives.”
If one tries to extract a specific emotional plot from them, Nipo resists the attempt, saying that while viewers may be tempted into narrative readings of his subjects, this is not what he is trying to do.
Nipo keeps his work close to perception
Nipo explained that he tries to keep his work as close as possible to perception before it becomes interpretation, before seeing becomes a story.
He described a process of dismantling the instinct to separate figure from ground, striving instead to “see the figure as ground and the ground as figure, interchangeably,” until the visual hierarchy dissolves into continuous attention. He looks so closely that the object is no longer simply an object, but part of the act of seeing.
Where he relies entirely on the visual surface to bypass the intellect and dissolve narrative, Adina, it seems, moves in the opposite direction: she uses words to create distance, to observe and frame what feels impossible to hold directly.
Her writing emerged as a lifeline during a period marked by the devastating loss of her mother and overwhelming anxiety. For her, intimacy requires distance, an act of observing herself observing.
“It was really to take something very hard and antagonistic that I didn’t understand, and distance it from myself, put it on the wall for a moment or on the computer or the page, and frame it,” she shared. “In words, it is conceptualization, ultimately reducing it to a concept, and through that, there is an ability to cope.”
Despite these opposing approaches, he zooms in until the image dissolves into light; she steps back to frame experience through language; the couple meets in a shared space.
“The moment of observation is shared,” Adina noted. “It’s a very quiet observation, very observant. I think for both of us, a striving for a certain essence.”
David agreed, noting the magnetic pull of her specific words: “When I read her poems, I feel that Adina is talking about me.”
This dialogue reaches one of its most interesting points in the way the two approach the moment a work is finished. Both treat their art as living entities, but their processes of separation are almost perfectly inverted.
A blank canvas is ‘completely whole’
For David, a blank canvas is “completely whole. There is no duality in it… the moment I do something, no matter what, there is already duality.”
From that first brushstroke, he becomes subservient to the disruption: “I am your servant,” he says to the work. “You tell me what you need, and I will do it for you, because you can’t do it for yourself.”
He works relentlessly until “the painting doesn’t need me anymore.” Once that equilibrium is reached, the emotional severance is swift and absolute.
“It really turns into an object, and it’s almost insulting,” he confessed. “Because suddenly it was life… the reason to get up in the morning, and suddenly it’s just another object in the house. It’s blocked. I have nothing to do with it.”
Adina, conversely, retains a more fluid relationship with her text. A poem is not a locked object; it remains a way of processing and living with experience. As it emerges from their dialogue, David works until the work no longer needs him, while Adina works until she no longer needs the poem.
Surrounded by David’s immersive canvases and Adina’s measured words, the gaze lingers, then moves on.
Through July 11, at Rothschild Fine Art, 2 Moshe Maor, Tel Aviv. 077-502-0484. https://www.rgfineart.com. Opening hours: Tuesday–Thursday 11:00–18:00, Friday–Saturday 10:00–14:00, Sunday–Monday closed (or by appointment).
Source:
www.jpost.com
