Article about Raphael Perez naive art paintings

Raphael Perez is an Israeli artist known for his naive style paintings of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem cities. His work captures the essence of these cities and their urban landscapes, highlighting their iconic buildings and sites. Perez’s paintings create an idealized atmosphere in which reality is beautified and presented in a dreamy, fantastic manner.

Perez’s work is characterized by its vibrant colors and cheerful depiction of life in these cities. The streets in his paintings are full of people and loving couples hugging and kissing, while the boulevards are lined with well-kept trees and bushes. Perez’s work presents a vision of Israel’s future as a promising startup nation, with beautiful, clean, and naive cityscapes featuring towering skyscrapers reaching towards the sky.

Through his art, Perez portrays Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem as modern and advanced cities. His paintings are a celebration of these cities’ unique characters and their places as cultural hubs in Israel. Perez’s work is a testament to the beauty and vitality of these cities and their people.

In conclusion, Raphael Perez is an Israeli artist whose naive style paintings of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem cities capture the essence of these cities and their urban landscapes. His work presents an idealized vision of these cities that is both beautiful and vibrant. Perez’s paintings are a celebration of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem and their unique characters as modern and advanced cities.


Article about Raphael Perez homosexual gay art paintings

Pride and Prejudice on Raphael Perezs Artwork

Raphael Perez, born in 1965, studied art at the College of Visual Arts in Beer Sheva, and from 1995 has been living and working in his studio in Tel Aviv. Today Perez plays an important role in actively promoting the LGBT lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual art and culture in Tel Aviv, and the internet portal he set up helps artists from the community reach large audiences in Israel and abroad. Hundreds of his artworks are part of private collections in Israel and abroad, and his artworks were shown in several group exhibitions in Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Zman LeOmanut art gallery, Camera Obscura, The Open House in Jerusalem, Ophir Gallery, The Haifa Forum and other private businesses and galleries.
In 2003-4 his paintings and studio appeared in a full-length movie, three student films and two graduation films.

Raphael Perez is the first Israeli artist to express his lifestyle as a Gay. His life and the life of the LGBT community are connected and unfold over hundreds of artwork pieces. His art creation is rare and extraordinary by every Israeli and international artistic standard. His sources of inspiration are first and foremost life events intertwined in Jewish and Israeli locality as well as influences and quotes from art history David Hockney, Matisse. This uniqueness has crossed international borders and has succeeded in moving the LGBT and art communities around the world.

This is the first time we meet an Israeli artist who expresses all of his emotions in a previously unknown strength. The subjects of the paintings are the everyday life of couples in everyday places and situations, along with the aspiration to a homosexual relationship and family, equality and public recognition. Perezs works bring forward to the cultural space and to the public discourse the truth about living as LGBT and about relationships, with all of their aspects � casual relationships and sex, the yearning for love, the everyday life and the mundane activities that exist in every romantic relationship � whether by describing two men in an intimate scene in the bathroom, the bedroom or the toilet, a male couple raising a baby or the homosexual version of the Garden of Eden, family dinners, relationship ups and downs, the complexity in sharing a life as well as mundane, everyday life competing with the aspiration to self realization � through Perezs life.


Perezs first artworks are personal diaries, which he creates at 14 years of age. He makes sure to hide these diaries, as in them he keeps a personal journal describing his life events in the most genuine way. In these journals he draws thousands of drawings and sketches, next to which he alternately writes and erases his so-called problematic texts, texts describing his struggle with his sexual orientation. His diaries are filled with obsessive cataloging of details, daily actions, friends and work, as well as repeating themes, such as thoughts, exhibits he has seen, movies, television, books and review of his work.

When he is done writing, Perez draws on his diaries. Each layer is done from beginning to end all along the journal. In fact, the work on the diaries never ends.
This struggle never ends, and when the emotion is passed on to paper, and it ends its role and becomes meaningless in a way, the visual-graphic side becomes dominant, due to the need to hide the written text, according to Perez. In books and diaries this stands out even more � when he chooses to draw in a style influenced by childrens drawings, the characters are cheerful, happy, na�ve and do not portray any sexuality, and when he tries drawing as an adult the sketches became more depressed and somber. During these years Perez works with preschool children, teaching them drawing and movement games. Perez says that during this period he completely abandoned the search for a relationship, either with a woman or a man, and working with children has given him existential meaning. This creation continues over 10 years, and Perez creates about 60 books-personal journals in various sizes notepads, old notebooks, atlases and even old art books.

In his early paintings 1998-1999 the transition from relationships with women to relationships with men can be seen, from ...   Read More