NAME: Eilon Reich
BIRTH PLACE: Israel
BIRTH DATE: 9.9.69
BIOGRAPHY
Bron & live in Israel.
Eilon’s art – which is cut off from the environment and innocent of any dialogue with the outside world – documents the artist’s inner struggles and confrontation with the world around him.
Eilon is an existentialist artist who discovers and exposes himself through the creative process. His gut feeling is his only compass and he refrains from succumbing to any preconceived ideas or concepts.
His unique style stems from a gradual artistic development process and from his unique character - introverted, sensitive and isolated on the one hand, and stormy, adventurous and cutting-edge, on the other.
In 1999, Eilon suffered a head injury in a traffic accident, an event that changed his life radically. This young married father woke up after a month-long coma to a reverse reality. Pre-accident Eilon created a bourgeois world in order to silence his stormy soul, whereas post-accident Eilon was born into a surrealistic reality – a purely spiritual reality.
Eilon places himself and his inner vision at the core of his work, and this usually bursts forth in a storm of mostly negative emotions: pain, despair, anxiety, a sinking felling.
His expressionist works of art reflect his own personal feelings and not necessarily the objective reality of the world around him.
He expresses his feelings in his art through female images simulating his inner identity – an inner world exuding visual violence and dehumanization of the body.
The limbs are crushed. The color is rich and dynamic. The brush strokes are bold and crude.
The physical tangibility of his current existence is terrified, the male image is devoid of masculinity, drained of any content. His sketches are crude, sharp, devoid of substance and backbone, lacking virility, broken and lost.
Eilon’s art makes use of every possible artistic means to express his feelings – including distortion, stylized forms, violent, association-evoking color combinations, as well as perishable materials and industrial substances.
Eilon is a graduate of the Plastic Arts Department at The "Thelma Yellin" School of the Arts. Ever since his youth, he had outstanding painting and sketching skills, which he used to depict his inner world in a unique and sensitive language all his own.
Eilon was influenced by Eanki Bilal – one of France’s most prominent comic book creators, author of the Nikopol Trilogy, the Immortel science fiction film and scores of other works – whose style is very close to painting. Bilal’s influence is discernible in Eilon’s work and in his narrative talent whose players hail from the world of comics. His artistic style is reminiscent of action painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning whose painting flourished between 1947 and 1955.
