Kobi - Apocalypse and Resurrection in Painting
Unlike today’s religious narrative, where cloying beauty is followed by marked mediocrity despite a remarkable artistic effort, Kobi has overturned the narrative, pushing human spiritual evolution into unimaginable depths. Armed with unmatched talent and quiet compassion, Kobi has been able to humanize, through painting, the psychological and visceral side of faith—the kind of faith embraced without any logical mediation. He has been able to give faith colors, forms, and a straight trajectory in our conscience, as very few have ever been able to do. His pictorial renderings of the key moments in Jesus’ life are presented with elements of strong modernism and a certain authentic materiality that in “Holiness of poverty” reaches its greatest splendor. Kobi observes, perceives, and sets aside any possibility of immediate redemption, as had been done since the Renaissance; he analyzes the collective dimension in its fragility and investigates it in the light of faith like never before. The other human elements present in the scene have been stripped of any intensity; they are incidental bodies within the scene, distracted and present in the moment. There is no interest in intervening or asserting themselves in communicative terms; all they need is the presence of Jesus. Through his brushstrokes, Kobi reveals to us a sense of pain that brushes against a hidden enthusiasm, something magical shines through from his person to end up directly on the canvas through a perfect use of tones and the thickness of the colors. A subtle and ardent enthusiasm that remains hidden like the spirituality of the one who observes, ready to explode upon contact with the Christ element. Through his body of pictorial work, the painter celebrates for the first time in the contemporary era the psychological profile of faith and its participants. He also replicates its sense of doubt and disorientation, making the path to salvation a slow and relentless wandering, with strong doubts and an even stronger devotion. An almost avant-garde way of reintroducing the religious element that, beyond the incredible beauty of his painting, is conveyed by the material factor, by the almost three-dimensional consistency of the figures and the scenic construction. Kobi is the Homer of figurative art, that magical storyteller who, wrapped in mystery, provides us with logical coordinates made of flesh and psychology to tell the most intangible story of humanity. Revitalizing the human dimension starting from Jesus, the highest revolutionary act, believing that humanity still has a chance at rebirth.