David Nipo at Rothschild Fine Art: The anatomy of a gaze

David Nipo's new exhibition, "And Love, What will become of it?" at Rothschild Fine Art in Tel Aviv, delves into the nature of perception and intimacy through hyper-realistic still lifes. Nipo insists he is not painting objects themselves, but rather "my field of vision. My field of vision itself." He aims to present the visual field as an abstract array of light stimulation, encouraging viewers to focus on the act of looking itself.

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I am not painting the flowers. I am painting my field of vision. My field of vision itself. If we allow ourselves for a moment not to see the things in the field of vision, but rather to see the field of vision as an abstract array of light stimulation.

The exhibition is a joint presentation with his wife, poet Adina Nipo, whose precise texts offer a complementary response to themes of intimacy, loss, and observation. Standing before Nipo's canvases, such as the translucent lisianthus or the heavy gourds in the title piece, viewers are drawn into a sustained attention to perception. Nipo resists narrative readings of his work, stating, "I am not looking for narratives." He seeks to keep his art as close as possible to raw perception before it solidifies into interpretation.

Nipo describes a process of dismantling the usual distinction between figure and ground, aiming to dissolve visual hierarchy into continuous attention. His intense focus on the visual surface bypasses the intellect and narrative, allowing the object to become part of the act of seeing. In contrast, Adina Nipo uses words to create distance and frame experiences that are difficult to grasp directly. Her writing emerged as a coping mechanism during a period of profound loss and anxiety, where conceptualization through words provided a way to distance herself from difficult emotions.

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Intimate, certainly. There is nothing in it but intimacy, and intimacy is not narrative. Intimacy is not something you can turn into a story, unless you really insist on it. I am not looking for narratives.

"It was really to take something very hard and antagonistic that I didn’t understand, and distance it from myself, put it on the wall for a moment or on the computer or the page, and frame it," she shared. "In words, it is conceptualization, ultimately reducing it to a concept." The exhibition thus presents two distinct yet interconnected approaches to processing complex emotional landscapes through visual art and written word.

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It was really to take something very hard and antagonistic that I didn’t understand, and distance it from myself, put it on the wall for a moment or on the computer or the page, and frame it. In words, it is conceptualization, ultimately reducing it to a concept.