The "lucky" gaze out at us from Arik Miranda's works: young, beautiful and carefree. The current exhibition deals with glamour, beauty and romanticism, but paradoxically also marks moments of rupture. Out of delicacy and precision, Miranda makes space for the cracks that are cleft beyond everything that glitters.

This exhibition is made up of a new body of works by Miranda, including video and works on paper, on which he has carried out his intentions. Miranda's preoccupation with beauty and high aesthetics reaches a peak in the course of delicate acts of drawing and scission, outpourings of color on top of images from art and photography books and from fashion magazines and the culture of haute couture.

Miranda's choice of images raises questions about the nature of beauty. He skillfully shifts out the perfect image, that which vacillates between exemplary images from
art history and enigmatic fashion photos.

Fashion and design photography has been greatly influenced by art. One example are Alex Katz's drawings, which served as an inspiration for fashion photographers, another is the lighting in Edward Hoppers paintings.

Hoppers' women hold an expression of longing and yearning. They seem to have been captured at the threshold, just before losing the ability to do so. Katz transfers this empty harsh gaze to large scale paintings. The signature style of his works, the isolation of the human form from its surroundings, echoes in fashion photography.

Miranda takes these fashion photographs and sensitizes moments of alienating beauty, and so allows the viewer to escape from the harsh isolation and to experience pleasure and pain in front of the painting.

The figures in Miranda's works usually stand alone, beautiful and tender. By adding color and transparency, he succeeds in creating moments of "togetherness." At such moments he will unite, for example, two figures that appear doomed to a lonely existence upon the page. This connection may be a fragile, minor moment, but it is there nonetheless. Miranda's works yearn to attain perfection and connect to the Other.

The choice of song that accompanies the exhibition stems from one of Miranda's prominent sources of inspiration—pop music—which to him captures the essence of love, heartbreak and longing. Pop may be "cheap," but it is powerful and enables us, even at difficult moments, to feel that there is something in the world that unites us all. In the consoling rhetoric of pop music we are all of us alone, and so in fact no-one is really alone.

As in a video clip, Miranda stages a surrounding that contains references to perfect beauty, eternal youth, and sexuality not yet aware of its strength. Within this space, he constitutes the moment at which a disturbance is distinguished—the intensity of whose presence is hard to determine. The dabbing of paint and play with the paper's transparency unfold, as it were, a secondary and doleful plot for the existing image. This is a naïve and clean eroticism, with a smell of cinnamon tea and apples. A Rembrandtesque candlelight flickers between two dimensions in Miranda's works and illuminates a new world, like a bittersweet caress.

Miranda's romanticism isn't cynical. It's the real thing. It colors and guides his life and labors.

Ofra Harnam