“When man is in trouble, God sends him a dog.”

)Alphonse de Lamartine, from Luc Besson’s“ Dogman”)

This series of works by Rakefet Viner Omer, consolidated under the title “Thick Milk,” is allegedly rooted in a different time and place. A scent of early 20th-century French bourgeoisie wafts from it: bread laden with butter, bar interiors, hotel rooms, cafes, and the opera. The figures are cloudy as whipped cream, their faces bitter as a cookie, and their eyes are haunted. The digestive system works overtime in the face of such hedonistic, drunken, or “stuffed” images. The very outline that forms these works is seemingly childish, as if unwilling to commit to the reality within which they exist. They are built like a collage of clashing textures and dull colors that no light can penetrate. A dense palette of greens, browns, and pinks, with the gold only functioning as a reflector. The pigments are heavy, like the hands of a Russian farmer digging through the frozen earth to pull out a potato, and all that appears to be light in the image is merely the tender butter, rich and fat to suffocate.

Viner Omer is a painter; however, in this current exhibition, her works appear as statue-esc. Each painting is displayed on a dedicated easel, giving the piece the form of a statue - a two-dimensional object that presents itself in three. The display is not quite a pedestal but a prosthesis, a family of prostheses built from used construction and scaffolding planks that were discarded after the fact. These are unstable display devices -  amputated, cracked and exposed, like the shellshocked soldiers of Otto Dix. This strange encounter between the gloomy reality of the bourgeoisie and the heart-wrenching appearance of the easels instills hope. The paintings are generous, trying their best to convey as much as they can, even if there’s no-one left to perceive them. They are the work of an artist whose daily routine is the act of painting itself. No matter which way the world turns next, the painting never stops. Preserving the timeless relationship between art and the world, the painting’s purpose - to testify.

Nearly all the works in the exhibition depict an interior space. An interior that is not domestic. An exterior interior. The artist traveled far, but she saw the same ghosts at every turn. Viner Omer’s art style belongs to the ‘bad painting’ genre, an expressive approach that remains faithful to the artist’s emotions within their personal experiences where the lines are free in a way often reserved for a child’s drawing. But what does ‘bad painting’ mean today? A painting that encapsulated the badness that envisions the ‘bad’ in every figure portrayed? These figures are real people, just normal people in the world. Viner Omer’s painting travels around the world, eating and drinking, meeting people, looking at dogs, reading a book, sleeping, taking a bath, looking out the window, digesting and getting digested, satisfied yet still hungry. As if it’s asking for “a well of milk in the middle of a city.”

Hila Cohen ־ Schneiderman, December 2024