R.V.O
Rakefet Viner Omer

Thick Milk
January - February, 2025
RAW ART gallery, Tel Aviv
Curator: Hila Cohen Schneiderman
“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, which has been consolidated under the title “Thick Milk”, is rooted in a different time, a different place. It presents like a dissection of the french bourgeoisie from the early 20th century: a slice of bread loaded with butter, the insides of bars, hotel rooms, cafes and the opera. The figures are cloudy as whipped cream, their faces donning a bitter smile, their eyes haunted. One’s digestive system might go into overdrive when faced with such hedonistic, drunken or “stuffed” images. The very outlines that form these works, are 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 hints of gold leaf woven between. The pigments are heavy, like the hands of a Russian farmer digging through the frozen earth to pull out a potato, yet in front of us is still an image of a rich, hearty piece of butter.
Viner Omer is a painter, however in this current exhibition her works appear 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 haphazard combination of wooden scraps and old scaffolding. The installation is unstable, 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 a feeling of 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 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 leave a mark.
Nearly all the works in the exhibition depict an interior space. A foreign interior. An exterior one. The artist travelled far, but at every turn she saw the same ghosts. 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 that is 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 in it? These figures are real people after all, just normal people in the world. Viner Omer’s painting goes around the world, eating and drinking, meeting people, looking at dogs, reading a book, it sleeps, takes a bath, looks out the window, digests and gets digested, fulfilled yet still hungry. As if it’s asking for “a well of milk in the middle of a city.”
Hila Cohen ־ Schneiderman, December 2024