Sharona Eliassaf

sharona-eliassaf.com | @sharonaeliassaf

Hyper-saturated world: Sharona Eliassaf filters our information age through the lens of landscape, exploring hyperreality and theatricality in the process.

Sharona Eliassaf Artist Statement:

Unexplained phenomena, and the relationship of painting to social change are subjects that are always central in my work. I often approach a painting as if it were a performance in a dysfunctional theatrical play and as if producing for a stage or film set, I build up moments by choreographing values of artificial light , by creating tensions and by reconfiguring what looks familiar to appear new or strange. Like in the media - on the news, propaganda broadcasts and television game shows, a backdrop always appears of a different environment and unfamiliar landscape. One that the viewer wouldn’t have access to. These landscapes in these backdrops of the sets and designs of these broadcasts come to manipulate and attract the viewer to a world that does not exist in their life. My paintings are always about these two worlds becoming one and turning into a third place. A hyper-saturated no man landscape, in which the familiar details of our own reality are filtered through an altogether different lens. My recent paintings exemplify a playful yet psychologically profound intersection of text (which disappears and reappears) and image, and layering of dense, richly colored patterns which remind of the design of specific game shows such as the Wheel of Fortune. Splitting my time since childhood between Israel and New York City, I am deeply affected by the changeable notion of place: collected experiences of overlapping countries, languages, identities, markets, anxieties, and technologies experienced in the everyday. Like in a dream, nothing is excluded as subject matter: TV game shows, storefront signs, breaking news, overheard conversations, cosmic phenomena, and digital images all swirl and synthesize in a single composition. Throughout these works like in the surreal reality of the world we live in today -laws of physics are suspended, as paintings depict upside-down worlds, hyperreal light, and dual-natured objects slipping in and out of abstraction. However, through the cracks of broken logic and fragmented phrasing, hidden meanings seem to arise. Their tales may be as obscure as the virtual realities I try to create— but speak just as clearly to the real world: Another stage where the props are moving pieces, futures are uncertain, messages are mixed, and encounters are chance. 

Checklist:

There in Spirit, Oil and spray on canvas, 60” x 48”, 2019, $6,500