Eliko Ner Gaon, painter and a photographer, paints a dim, nearly forgotten, world. Dreams become the raw material upon which he forcefully engraves, which he succeedingly bandages with compassion. The layers pile up violently, adorned on the material surface by the soft touch of the finger pads. Every wound is a story, the artist’s fantasy to expose more of himself. Every figure captured by the camera’s lens is a suspicious point of view on the reality with which the artist is faced, or which he attempts to create or revive, as he recalls the right way to do so.

Ner Gaon succeeds in deluding what takes place in his works, as well as in the viewer, turning the dramatized and fictional moment into one that is entirely true, or, perhaps, an illusion. The photographic works present a realistic dream in which everything is clear and sharp, the physical nature of the work is present, and the simple silence created by the tension between identity and disguise turns photography into a striking truth. Everything is precisely layed out, and everything has significance, or hints to a memory that will soon be forgotten. Each photograph is time capsule, and in every time the connection between the artist and his personal life strives to raise new question regarding the sense of belonging to a home.

Ner Gaon uses his personal belongings, as well as his familial ones, and those which he gathered on his travels around the world. He transforms memories into cinematic scenes and revives oblivion to remember the moment that was or the place that was destroyed. He does not say who they are, where they are from, he does not reveal when or where, he does not give every glance a small piece of information. It is everywhere and nowhere in the world, these are abandoned spaces which he momentarily dressed, or it is a live home. And a documented family. The objects are planted in the space and are given a role, these become sacred cues in which he asks the viewer to observe and look for them. Everything is identified and everything is remote, as if it belongs to another place, another time and a distant tribal culture.

In his paintings too, Ner Gaon manages to create an illusion caused by layers of a life story. The peeling and engraving reveal memories of color and technique, the weight of the grooved fabric produces an agricultural horizon, and the precision of the performance or the random wiping turn a monochromatic stain, questionably rusty, into breezy wheat fields. His large-scale paintings . His large-scale paintings create the illusion and visual confusion to which the artist aspires in his works, blurred and scribbled or sharp like a knife, each stalk is made of dense fibers and each leaf is decorated with an organic texture of veins and capillaries. In his portrait paintings, Ner Gaon constructs his figures from the grey,dense wheat, pale pink capillaries and a variety of impulsive techniques. The figures are painted in unconventional close-ups and odd angles, allowing the viewer to pry and look at them exposed, to share that moment with them as those who have the power, or as victims begging for mercy.

Ner Gaon succeeds at maintaining a chilling tension between what is happening on the surface of his works and what takes place beneath them. He creates an intriguing, passionate dialogue between the figure and the space in which it resides, between the dusty landscape and the lonely stem peeking out from the plowed earth. In every work, be it a painting or a photograph, it is the artist's job to make soil and regerminate the land.