Ido Shalmon
My works emerge from a direct response to a paradoxical mental reality, saturated with contradiction, absurdity, and ongoing conflict. I work from a place in which image, body, and consciousness are in a constant process of disintegration, suspension, and at times a temporary attempt at reconstruction
For me, painting is not a representation of crisis, but an action from within rupture — an attempt to act from inside a reality that has lost continuity, stability, and a secure symbolic order. Within the act of painting, a tension unfolds between abstraction and figuration, between naive playfulness and a charged emotionally inflected personal line, and between these and expressions of sexuality, violence, Kafkaesque unease, and dystopia.
There is an attraction to myth, but also to its fracture and dismantling from the “inner truth” it appears to contain. The visual language I develop does not seek reconciliation, but
friction, discomfort, and destabilisation, in a continuous dialogue with the sublime and the beautiful.