Kobi Assaf brings the cultural spirit of the 19th century to the 21st .His paintings are drenched in a non-Israeli brown mist, illuminated with a dim twilight, to create the look of paintings made before the era of electricity.
The imprint of Romanticism is in his paintings, with its yearning for distant realms, like the European Romantics, yet they also contain sober self-aware modernism.
To achieve this goal, Assaf shatters the philosophical harmony of thought, leaving sections of his paintings bare and unfinished. He depends on his sharp painterly power and scatters hints which suffice to construct a world which is “similar” but restless.
His work fundamentally differs from the conventions of Classism and Romanticism which strived to achieve a sensation of peacefulness, as he raises to the threshold of consciousness a demonic, seductive and dark universe.
