Gil Haller

Gil Haller

“In his exceptional style, inspired by vintage magazine images and old family photo albums that go back to the early 20th century, Gil Haller manages to distill history and culture into paintings and drawings that serve almost as time capsules: life that has stood still.
Haller’s palette draws an interesting and unique black and white range of colors, managing to extract a wide tonal range of emotional expressions, of time and space, temperature and mental statements.
Haller’s outstanding talent does not come out only by his phenomenal technical abilities, which by themselves are considered virtuoso, but by his ability to avoid sliding into over-sentimental expressions or mannerism. The restraint in Haller’s paintings and superb punctuality give the feeling of a time-tunnel that the perceiver is being drawn into, yet without a nostalgic and saccharine remembrance. These paintings crafted by Haller are a mirror to a lost period, without being anachronistic; they are wonderfully contemporary, fresh, yet very touching
and moving.
But along with his ‘historic’ paintings, Haller practices perceptual colorful compositions, taken from his everyday life, travels and immediate family sights and experiences. These pastoral landscapes and mis-en-scènes might be perceived as a multi-dimensional doubting examination of the current present, which does not come across as taken straight from reality, where as the realistic b&w images are crystal clear but taken from a far, distant recollection, as trying to cling on a solid, safe to remember past.
Gil Haller carries the torch of excellence in contemporary painting, while respecting yet questioning representational imagery of past culture, along with the tradition of realistic-figurative painters”.