“It seemed to me, on a conceptual level, that the starting point, the trigger of painting, was self-portraiture... (But) the more I tried to grasp the face I saw in the mirror, the more it escaped me. The more opaque and anonymous it became, until it looked like a rock or a stone. My self-portraits became landscapes. This is when I decided to start working outdoors. The landscapes I chose then weren’t friendly and intimate places, but rather virgin places where nature had retained the memory of the genesis. The mountains around Jerusalem or the sunsets over the sea. Later, I reintroduced self-portraits into these landscapes, like the series of self-portrait with a sunset, one of which is on show in the exhibition.”

“self-portrait isn’t a portrait by the artist of himself. When I paint a model, I can paint the person smiling, reading, listening to music, dreaming, or even sleeping. I can paint him in profile, from behind, but I cannot paint myself by actually painting myself, facing myself, looking at myself in the eyes. What I see in the mirror is a painter painting himself. The subject of a self-portrait is about the act itself of painting, and not the portrait of himself by the artist."‍

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Ofer Lellouche, Albertina Catalouge, June 2023