Artists

Zoe Sever/Art that makes the heart rejoice

The colorful and rhythmic landscapes of virtuoso painter Zoe Sever are reminiscent of the landscapes of the mythical artist Paul Klee – and like Klee’s, they inspire the viewer with good atmosphere and a joyful mood. Klee has described his art as “taking the line for a walk”, and much the same can be said of Sever’s drawing. She, too, travels with her clear lines, constructing landscape patterns made of densely symbolic, stunningly beautiful puzzles, folkloric characteristics and boundless texture symbols characterized by an exhilarating and diverse spectrum of color. Her art is indubitably assertive, bent on a providing a positive description of our world, on reflecting its epic and romantic aspects, on expressing in a humorist and joyful manner the experience of travel and observation of the urban space of Tel Aviv, the metropolis. Zoe Sever’s “city that doesn’t sleep” is a city exploding with fireworks, festival grounds built out of colorful houses and dynamic art works, a place of rhythm and pleasantly Sisyphean movement.

Through her artistic interpretation, Zoe Sever’s works come to host a fascinating dramatic dialogue between natal landscape, paintings of the city itself and the vistas of imagination it contains, along with the artist’s unique interpretation for its shape. Sever possesses a special index of shapes and colors from which she draws her inspiration for her works. The viewer has the feeling that there is no need for explanation and analysis of what he sees. Her works are structured exactly like those works included in the school of Naïve art, and are characterized by strong colors, emphasis on outlines, distortion of proportion, simplistic approach to light and shade, glorification of innocence, intelligible painting and, of course, an optimistic and utopian view of life. At the same time, the works themselves are certainly not naive. They can certainly be included in the framework of modern interpretation of the concept of impressionist art, built upon the artist’s personal and specific perspective of the world. Her refreshing, high-quality work is received with great love and with complete emphatic identification with her viewers, which explains her meteoric success among collectors in Israel and abroad.