Eran Nave / Rats Nibble the Moon
—

For his first solo show at Sommer contemporary Art, Eran Nave created a pictorial-installation, in which paintings, drawings and sculptures are intermingled in makeshift constellations. The small room is transformed into a nightmarish playground, where the sky is upside down, candles are suicidal, aliens are smoking cigarettes and smiley faces reflect upon depression, decay and horror. The clock here has stopped ticking, and time is stretched on a single mattress which disguises itself as a cigarette pack. This is a commercial time, sold to us as the desired five minutes cigarette break.

In his characteristic illustrative style, Nave draws comic yet morbid scenes. His sources of inspiration are varied, and include images taken from booklets on aliens. The sentence “Linda, as you can see I am no artist, but this is very close”, seen next to an alien portrait, was originally written by a survivor of a Close Encounter of the Third-Kind, as an apology for his amateurish attempt to draw the alien he encountered from memory. Nave also appropriated two found still life paintings, in which he turned lemons in to weird smiley moon-like faces. The traditional grid structure, originally used by an unknown painter for the construction of the composition, can still be seen.

Nave can be defined as an amateurish professional. Some consider him to be a successor of the Israeli Want of Matter style. However, his world of content is somehow more inverted and phantasmagorical. His use of cheap materials is not a social critique, but rather a personal identification. This current installation can be seen as a materialization of digital infrastructures, in which images float and voices collide in a virtual mayhem.

Eran Nave (b. 1979, Tel Aviv) lives and works in Tel Aviv. He completed his BFA and MFA at Bezalel Academy of the Arts, Jerusalem. He exhibited solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions at Moby Museum, Bat Yam (2013), The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon (2012), Herzliya Biennale (2011) and ART TLV Biennale, Tel Aviv (2008). He is 2007 recipient of the Keren Sharet Prize for Drawing and sculpture and of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Prize for excellent student in the name of Ehud Alhanani. Since 2007 he is a member of the band ‘Lovegrenade’.