History

Ofer Lellouche was born in Tunisia, 1947. He studied Mathematics and Physics at Saint Louis college, Paris. In 1966, two months before his final examinations he ran away from home to kibbutz Yehiam in the Western Galilee, Israel. In 1968, during his military service, he suffered severe hepatitis which immobilized him for several months. It was during this illness that he started to paint. He first studied with Yehezkiel Streichman, an abstract lyrical painter, at the Avni Institute of Art in Tel Aviv. He later returned to Paris to study with the sculptor Cesar, At the same time obtaining a master's degree in Literature. His thesis concerned the work of Stephane Mallarme.

The late 1970s: Performances, videos, first self-portraits.

"A self portrait by Lellouche is not a portrait of Lellouche painted by Lellouche” 

'A Tombstone to Narcissus', Lellouche's first major work, 1975. 

"The way of lyrical and expressionist abstraction, using the metaphor of a painter painting an   apple, was to erase the apple and concentrate on the page The way of new realism was to erase the page. I felt I had to restore the tension between the page and the apple, between sign and referent."  "The work consisted of two parts: a randomly chosen rock, and a clay sculpture which was a portrait of that rock. The clay was to crumble in time, while the rock, nature, would remain."

During the coming years, working outside the mainstream of contemporary art, which determined that "painting was dead", Ofer Lellouche willingly went back to the sources of painting. He drew and etched self-portraits, first in a very expressionist way, using violent industrial colors, and then in a more classical way.

"A self portrait by Lellouche is not a portrait of Lellouche painted by Lellouche.  I can paint you, eating or sleeping. I can paint 

myself only while painting myself. A self-portrait is more the representation of the face of the painter, an attempt to catch the act of painting itself." 

In 1979 Lellouche did a few Video performances related to the subject of the mirror."A self portrait on a transparent mirror"  was first presented at the Tel Hai Museum in 1980. 

"The paper is on my right, the mirror is on my left. I am the painter and I am the model. If the painter wants to change mirror and the paper are symmetrical. I started to paint directly on the mirror, using a transparent mirror and a video camera." something on the paper, the model changes his pose in the mirror. Often, the model anticipate the will of the painter. The way I place myself in the mirror, is as creative as the way I draw on the paper. A self portrait is always a performance. the mirror and the paper are symmetrical.  I started to paint directly on the mirror, using a transparent mirror and a video camera."

Most of the tapes done in the seventies were erased. Recently the artist remade some of those video performances.  During this period, the majority of Lellouche's work - painting, drawing and etching was dealing with the subject of self portrait.

The Early 1980s: landscapes

As the self portraits became more and more abstract, and looked more and more like a texture of some mountainous landscape , the artist began, then, to paint views of the Judean hills. 

"More than to any other landscape, Lellouche keeps returning to the Judean Hills and especially to the vistas of Nes Harim. These landscapes harmonize restless powers of primordial spaces with longings that seek to arrive as a state of being at peace with their surroundings. From the hills that surround Jerusalem there rises a firm and uniform world of infinite spaces. The branching lines are presented as vague reflections of the forms of the hills, and the deep expanses are exposed in parallel to those successive levels of terraces which were built, so it seems, without any method. Even the radiant light of the gleaming white Jerusalem stone has been dulled, darkened in a way that seems to unify the natural and the artificial which seep into each other by means of common tones and parallel structures. These contrasts between contracting and expanding movements, between lights and shadows that continue to conquer each other and between the consolidation and the decomposition of the symmetrical structure, imbue Lellouche's landscapes with their intense sense of drama". 
Mordechai Omer,"Striped bare before the exalted" 

“In the 1980s I drew the Judea Mountains in oils and water colors, and I was in despair. Each time it seemed to me like a Provence landscape - too gentle, colorful and pastoral, instead of the luminous light of the Judea Mountains. One day, I forgot the plate inside the acid. The result was black, and it was then that I discovered how luminous can black be”. 

"How luminous Can Black Be" - Ofer Lellouche in Conversation with Mordechai Omer" 

“...A landscape is on one hand what one sees - a house, a tree, a particular light at a particular time. You have to measure the height of the tree in relation to the width of the house to understand the structure and architecture of the landscape, things like that. But a landscape painting is principally the impression that remains in us from that landscape as it appears to our eyes after we have forgotten its details, or as we might dream about it. In dreams a most precise image comes into being, without our being able to accord it an actual form.

 I remember that during the early 1980s, I went to paint on the outskirts of Jerusalem. At first I painted the landscape in purples, in pinks, in all the colors I saw in the natural setting. But when I'd review the results in my studio later in the evening, I'd be disappointed. It seemed that the Jerusalem landscape could have been painted in the south of France; it didn't convey the incredible density of the light as I remembered it. Then I tried using white while painting the landscape. On my return to the studio it looked like bits of plaster. One day, by chance, I left a copper plate for an etching in the acid. The result was almost black. I was surprised to see how this black landscape brought back to me the memory of the brightness." 
Ofer Lellouche “On Painting from Nature"

The late 1980s: Figures in Landscapes

Feeling the need to go back to the figure, in the mid-1980s Ofer Lellouche did a series of large-format paintings of one or two figures in a landscape. These included "Adam and Eve" (1984), "The painter in Judean hills" (1987), "Self-portrait at Sunset" (1990), and "Self-portrait in a garden" (1991). 

""Since the mid-1980s, Lellouche has intensified the encounter between the self-portrait and the space it occupies. In canvasses such as "Figure in a Landscape" (1987), which were shown at the 19th Biennial of Sao Paulo, or in series such as "Self-Portrait at sunset" (1993-1994), the artist's 'psychological portrait' is positioned in front of backgrounds with a vast, panoramic depth of field. The inverse proportion between the figure and the background brings to mind the moving way in which Lellouche described Odilon Redon's portrait of Gauguin: "The figure in the painting by Redon is closed in on itself, introverted, pointed, opaque from a surfeit of existence, floating in a space that is endlessly disintegrating". 

"Striped bare before the exalted", Professor Mordechai Omer, Chief Curator, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 


“Afternoon, at sunset. The roofs, the streets, the clouds, the reflections in the wafer, everything arranges itself according to a perspective that draws everything together to a single point. A point on the horizon. This is the vanishing point. In French it is called "the point of escape". The world escapes into this point. If I walk along the promenade, this point moves with me. This point is symmetrical to me in relation to the world. The world functions like a giant mirror and the vanishing point is my reflection and the decisive proof of my existence. Euclidian perspective is based on a point theory of the subject (meaning that the subject is a point, and has its absolute density). The eye-hole of Albrecht Durer's machine; or Leonardo: "It is preferable to paint with one eye than with two”. 
Ofer Lellouche, Remarks 

The Early 1990s: Back to the figure - The Ateliers

During this period Lellouche etched intensively, producing more than 600 etchings. He illustrated Stephan Mallarme's famous poem, "Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard", and published books such as "Panim (faces)" and "Ein Karem". In the early 1990s, the landscapes which were background for the figures became more and more opaque till they develop into wide black surfaces. Then Multiplying the same figure on the same background he created "The Ateliers".