Painting a fantasy world

‘Suspension of Disbelief,’ Erez Regev’s first exhibition, tells stories of a parallel reality.

By CARL HOFFMAN
Bus Stop (photo credit: Courtesy)
Bus Stop
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Most people like to dream. Most people have active imaginations. Most people can tell the difference between reality and what they dream or imagine.
For Erez Regev, however, the distinction between what is real and what is not real is not only meaningless but actually nonexistent. Tell Regev that he lives in a fantasy world and he will probably answer, “Thank-you.”
And his current debut exhibition of paintings and drawings, called “Suspension of Disbelief,” tells us something else: that Regev does not live in that fantasy world alone. He says, “In its broadest definition, fantasy is everything that is not right in the present moment, everything that cannot be perceived by the five senses in the here and now. It includes everything that has been in the past – and that you have felt in the past – and everything that is possible in the future.
“Considering that we live most of our lives in the near past or the near future, we are actually living in fantasy all the time. I think that fantasy is a complementary piece of life that fills in the other part. I believe that we as human beings are meant to visualize other worlds. It’s part of our psyche, our psychic capabilities. These capabilities were meant to be used in this way. Everyone requires this fantasy part in our lives. We cannot live without it. It’s part of our programming.”
Born 28 years ago, Regev grew up in Even Yehuda, attended the Hadassim High School and served in the Israel Air Force. “I was an F-16 technician. My unit were the first people on the scene when the plane landed, to unhook the pilot, look the plane over and troubleshoot any immediate problems,” he recalls. He graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design last year, specializing in animation and screen-based arts. He has been drawing all his life.
“I started drawing and painting from the moment I could pick up a pencil,” he says. “There was never a time in my life when I did not draw. All children draw, but most stop when they reach a certain age. Some people come back to drawing and painting later on in life. I simply never stopped. As a child, I sat and did drawings in our garden. Later it was doodles in my school notebooks. As I got older, the things that I drew became more developed, more complex. I can’t really remember the first time I began to draw. The first time was at an age earlier than memory.”
Regev’s fascination with the world of fantasy, however, began at the age of nine. “It was my older brother who discovered it before me, and then introduced me to the world of fantasy and fantasy role-playing.
He left all that after a couple of years, though, but I have been there ever since.”
And he has been there devotedly. Regev began participating in Dungeons and Dragons games at age 14, and is now an active member of the Israeli Role Playing Society, which was founded in the 1990s and is today a community with hundreds of members. “Fantasy is not a ‘hobby’ for me,” he says. “It’s a calling.”
Asked why the world of fantasy had such an effect on him at age nine, he is silent for a long moment before replying, “That’s a good question, and I can’t quite put my finger on the correct answer. It simply ‘clicked’ for me, as though I were a puzzle with one missing piece. Fantasy was simply the right shape, the right fit, and exactly what was missing to complete the puzzle. As to why fantasy was the missing piece, I just felt like it was part of my natural state, part of who I am, that I had somehow been born without it and was meant someday to find it.”
One thing seems evident, however. Regev’s introduction to fantasy not only changed his life, but set a new direction for his budding artistic vision. Regev has saved much of his work, from his earliest childhood doodles until the present day, he says. “You can very clearly see the difference in my work before and after I learned about fantasy, what fantasy is. My art before that was mostly animals – some dinosaurs, because I was a kid – but mostly animals. And after that, it was all mythology, fantasy and history, starting right at that moment and developing while I grew up and read more. But even before fantasy came into my work, I was already using my art to tell a story, first to myself and later to others as I grew up. Narrative is very important in my work, and it’s very important to me. It’s one of the reasons why I do not do abstract art. It’s very important to me that the narrative be visible. That requires recognizable characters and recognizable situations.”
IN “SUSPENSION of Disbelief,” his current and first exhibition, those recognizable characters are us, and those recognizable situations are our everyday lives, inextricably interwoven with our own parallel fantastic worlds. A painting called Reflections depicts a young woman gazing into a mirror and seeing a fantasy version of herself reflected back. Another, entitled Altercation, shows three people sitting on a living-room sofa, apparently having some sort of argument or debate, with a screen in the foreground of the painting showing the same people as fantastic characters, having an epic battle.
Interestingly, both the people on the sofa and their fantasy avatars on the screen appear to be having quite a good time.
Other paintings and drawings tell stories of a “real-time world” that is virtually pregnant with fantasy. The Forgemistress shows how a young girl writing a story in a school notebook causes the fantasy figure she is writing about to spring vividly to life. In Blueprint, we see two people at a sci-fi convention, with the man describing the huge robot he is planning to build and the woman listening while sitting at the foot of the very robot the man is describing.
Regev has both whimsical and dark sides. The former is represented by Waiting at the Bus Stop, in which we see four people enjoying a brief fantasy interlude while waiting for a bus, with two other people off to the sides, looking quite annoyed. The fantasy participants are painted in vivid colors; the two very irritated people who have removed themselves from the fun are colored almost gray.
Regev’s dark side is best presented in Martyr, a self-portrait that features two carrion birds perched on his arm while blood oozes from what appears to be slashed wrist. “I painted this at a very dark moment in my life,” Regev says.
Asked whether he does his best work when happy or unhappy, he replies, “At both extremes, when I am most depressed and when I am most happy.”
As for his influences as an artist, he says, “That’s a very long list.” But he pays special homage to Leonardo da Vinci, who, he says, “always tried to present three things when he painted a portrait: how this person sees himself, how he sees the world, and how the world sees him. All of this in one painting.”
Not surprisingly, Regev also cites the surrealist painters, especially Salvador Dali, as well as a genre called “Fantastic Realism,” which he considers himself part of.
And while he says he draws a lot of inspiration from contemporary comic books, he does not consider himself a comics artist.
Asked finally what he would do with his days if he could no longer engage in fantasy and art, he says, “I cannot stop involving myself with fantasy. And even if I could no longer earn my living from creating, I would still create, because I cannot stop. Even if I’m only creating in my head. If you say no fantasy, no art – well, you’re actually asking me die. Maybe not physically, but my mind will die.”
“Suspension of Disbelief” is showing until August 4 at the Artists’ House, 9 Alharizi Street, corner of Ibn Gvirol, Tel Aviv. (03) 524-6685. Monday to Thursday, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., 5 to 7 p.m.; Friday, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.