Ilan Halfon

In my art, I posit childhood icons like Mickey Mouse, Oly and Bart Simpson (the eternally ten-year-old child from the TV animation series The Simpsons) in mostly dark, new and surprising background that produces a dark, provocative statement.

My artworks genuinely integrate influences of pop art with expressionist and radical tendencies of black protest art. I grew up at the commercial fashion industry as an entrepreneur who founded, as a young adult, the fashion company Sacks. About four years ago, I decided to leave my job as CEO and owner of the successful business and to dedicate my life to painting without previous knowledge about artmaking. As a culture industrialist in the recent past – a successful fashion industrialist – I currently examine, in a critical perspective, the daily production of mass culture.

I posit the beloved and nostalgic fiction drawn characters of my childhood – sometimes colorful, sometimes redesigned in black and white, sometimes in innocent poses, sometimes provocative – in large oil paintings which are often black or grey. I make them in smearing multiple layers of “Noir Nero Negro Black” oil paint on canvas with brushes and painting knifes. Inspired by expressionism, my artworks depict a shadowy, nightmarish, demonic and macabre world which is more obscure than observable, and dangers may emerge, at any moment, out of the darkness. The uncommon connection I make between the innocent and childish icons of the commercial pop culture, and the dark, menacing apocalyptic world, provides a new, disillusioned and ironic perspective on the intricate relationship between the familiar and the unknown, naivety and danger, hedonism and sarcasm, entertainment and perilousness, childhood and lost. In my art, I confront the powerfulness of the drawn characters that effected my life for decades, since childhood until the present, by changing the conditions of their appearance and repositioning them in totally different manner that make them new, independent images with complicated personal meanings.

In contrast to the univocal whiteness of the iconic figures (and Bart Simpson’s typically yellowness), “overflowing” part of my works with dark black color with its diverse tones and subtleties comprises transgressive meanings. With my brushes, I transform Walt Disney’s sweetish drawn world into a black protest art, a political and even anarchistic radical art that aims to challenge the hegemonic white culture that explicitly and implicitly promotes a racist hierarchy. The white culture produces numerous male and female icons whose skin is snowy white, mostly in identical degree of whiteness, pinkness or yellowness – from Superman to Batman; from Tarzan to Zorro; from Mickey Mouse to Bart Simpson. In contrast, my works demand the viewers’ attention to the intricacy, multidimensionality, and multilayered and multidirectional qualities of the black existentiality with all its multiple tones, shades, meanings, subtleties and hints, particularly in the age of growing Afro-American protest against the continuous social oppression and the increasing police violence against black citizens.

Influenced by German expressionism, my artworks wish to portray a world that its social constructions collapse, its traditional knowledge is demised, its recognized symbols lose their charm, and the familiar dreams are growingly unstable and are not instantly approved but rather criticized. My reinterpretation of the industrial icons – whether in positing them in a different context, a dramatic darkness, or colorfully portraying animals with demonic, dramatic elements or integrating gleamingly colorful drawn figures with abstract, intense motives – emerges from a constant search after new intensities and stimulating spiritual powerfulness and their heralded new horrors and existential meanings.