As It Stands II
Eli Diner
Curator: Vivian Hirsh Birkenfeld
At the center of Eli Diener’s oeuvre, there is a collision between the vulnerable, living body and the rigid mechanisms of power, between the human gaze and instruments of control and war. Diener swings between actual and mythological reality as he studies how image, memory, and matter blend into a poignant statement about our existence in this time and place.
The painting The West Bank is Here (2004) depicts a nude figure, lit up and quiet, standing near a tank and building rubble - the battlefield invades the studio. The feminine body appears here not as a symbol of beauty and eroticism, but as testimony. Two worlds are colliding. The stripped landscape behind the figures seems like an arena of consciousness - a place where the Western image of a “nude model” meets the Middle East’s daily news. The gap between the desire for representation and the horror of reality, between the aesthetic and the political, defines Diener’s painterly act: thick, almost rough layers of paint build a sensitive, human figure. Existing on the verge of crumbling.
The prints of the Later series Pegasus (2024-2025) function as an allegorical extension of that tension. The winged horse, a mythical image of freedom, inspiration, and flight, is revealed here as injured, armored, quasi-mechanical. The lines engraved into the metal plate afford the animal’s body a sense of pain and rigidity, as if the myth itself has been worn down, bearing the marks of time and struggle. The transition from a light background into black highlights the duality of light and dark, of the possibility of exaltation and the earth’s pull.
Diener touches upon mythology not as an escape but as an act of rehabilitation - an attempt to ask whether imagination can still soar amongst the destruction, and whether the human and animal bodies can still represent hope.
Between the West Bank is Here and Pegasus lies an arc of two decades, during which the transition from direct political painting to a poetic yet dark musing on the dissolution of civilization is evident. The touch of an artist’s hand is apparent as he seeks to confront the viewer with personal and collective responsibility – with a clear, pitiless, yet compassionate gaze.