David Boskovich’s series of paintings unfolds a biographic journey, which revolves around the woman's womb. The image of the womb acts as a formal and thematic starting point for the paintings, which deal with male and female identity, with birth and rediscovery, with infertility and pain, with the idea of love and processes of maturity and aging. The red-orange vermillion pigment, which is dominant in the works, dictates a surrealistic and alienated atmosphere. This atmosphere joins and intensifies the preoccupation with sexuality, dreams and fantasy, as part of the definition of the self that emerges out of the entire series.

Boskovich is a traditional painter in his manner of approaching the craft of painting, in the way he works on the canvas, in his layering of colour and in his usage of figurative line. At the same time, he stands out in his surrealistic style that combines realism with fantastical sexual images – an approach which deepens in his work along the years.

The human figure – portraits of family members, of friends and of various models – was always at the center of his oeuvre. It is an expression of his need to decipher the nature of looking at the body and the human face, and to reach out for the revelations entailed regarding the inner journey of the soul.

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In “Erotic Eroded Land”, a previous large series of his that was shown at the Jerusalem Theatre five years ago, he focused on the analogy between body and earth. The paintings oscillated between the figurative and the abstract, and were characterized by a monochromic yellow. By peeling off the layers of the earth and examining the changing of the landscape, he explored the concept of eroticism that lies in the alteration of form.

The Vermillion series similarly presents an act of peeling, of analysis and of dissection. Yet, at the same time, it expresses love and caress for the female body, and at its centre the womb. This internal receptacle that contains life and nurtures it, becomes, in Boskovich's paintings, a memory room, a peeping hole to the unconsciousness, a form that goes through continuous changes. These are perpetual metamorphoses that embody the endless internal transitions, mental and emotional.

However, the intimacy in Boskovich's works is detached and estranged, and this sensation is increased by his use of the vermillion colour, which forms a kind of a permanent screen between the painting and its observer. The resistance of the paintings in the face of the observer create a pictorial ensemble that forms an imaginary womb-like space, which begets the paintings and holds them within it.

Irena Gordon