PAINTED MEMORIES

Though he works fluidly across forms, it is the photographic image—its limits, potential, and transformation—that anchors his creative journey. With a background that bridges formal art education and personal exploration, Roee has spent the past eight years gradually shifting from traditional photography into more abstract, layered modes of visual storytelling. His work is shaped by an ongoing interest in memory, emotional resonance, and the instability of visual truth.

Art has accompanied Roee since childhood. Early on, he turned to drawing and music—playing drums from the age of nine—as outlets for processing experience and expressing emotion. When he moved to Belgium as a child, unable to speak the local language, art became a vital form of connection and identity. This early intimacy with creative expression continued through structured art education and eventually shaped his multidisciplinary studies at Shenkar College of Art, where he deepened his engagement with photography, video, and painting.

Influenced by artists like Francesca Woodman, Gerhard Richter, Marina Abramović, and Tracey Emin, Roee’s work is grounded in both personal vulnerability and a conceptual questioning of artistic boundaries. He’s interested in what happens when one medium collides with another—and when memory is not simply preserved, but remade.

This spirit of collision and reconstruction is at the heart of Painted Memories: A Dialogue with My Father’s Lens, a photo series that merges analogue family photographs with Roee’s abstract paintings. The series is a deeply intimate response to personal and inherited loss, and a meditation on how visual memory is layered, fragmented, and ultimately re-authored through time.

What draws you to the arts?

From a young age, art has been a central force in my life. Before I could even name it, I was drawn to drawing and music; playing drums at nine not only helped me process emotions but also shaped my creative interpretation of the world. Even today, when looking at paintings, they often evoke melodies, underscoring the profound connection between visual art and music for me. Photography also became significant early on. I was always the kid with the camera, capturing moments and creating stories. My early video camera “installations” were my first experiments in visual storytelling. Now, while I have a small photography business, my artistic photography explores abstract blends of portraiture, landscape, and abstract aesthetics. This passion for combining mediums and exploring their intersections is now central to my artistic practice.

What do you like best about this project?

What I like best about this project is its profound personal resonance and the unique way it blurs the lines between past and present, and between different artistic mediums. The process of projecting my father’s old film photos onto my abstract paintings was an incredibly intimate and transformative experience. It felt like a true dialogue, not just with the images themselves, but with generations of my family and with the very essence of memory. This series holds immense personal significance. My father’s family experienced the tragic loss of my grandfather in a car accident in the early 1970s. My father was only nine years old at the time, leaving my grandmother to raise four young boys on a very limited income as a physiotherapist at a state hospital. To try and grasp or understand what that period was like, I delved into our family’s photo archives. These rare pictures of my father and his brothers as children, alongside precious photographs of my grandfather, who worked as an agricultural biologist, are therefore incredibly meaningful to me. The act of adding my traces of paint onto these photographs, shifting these memories into something new and different, has been a deeply personal journey. Sharing this series with my father’s family was an honor, and it was genuinely touching for them to re-experience these cherished memories through these updated or artistically transformed forms. The emotional depth and the visual experimentation, where two distinct worlds interfere to create something entirely new, are what I find most compelling about this project.

Each piece in Painted Memories begins with a projection. Using film photographs taken by his father in the 1970s–1990s—quiet portraits, domestic scenes, unguarded moments—Roee casts these images onto abstract paintings he creates by hand. The superimposed visuals are then re-photographed, creating a hybrid image where analogue memories collide with contemporary interventions. Faces blur into brushstrokes. Bodies flicker in colour fields. The specificity of the photograph dissolves into mood and gesture.

In Painted Memories 2, for instance, a young boy (Roee’s father or uncle) stares directly into the lens, his arms crossed on a wooden table. Across his striped shirt and boyish expression, a field of pale blue pigment interrupts the surface—neither fully hiding nor revealing him. This is the push and pull of memory: present and distant, concrete and fleeting.

In Image 5, a girl´s face emerges in warm orange and electric blue, her closed eyes framed by swirls of painted gesture. The softness of her expression is amplified—not overwhelmed—by the riot of colour, as if the emotion stored in the image has become visible. These are visual thresholds—quiet, liminal spaces that suggest presence as much as absence.

Roee describes the series as a form of visual conversation, one that connects generations. The project holds deep emotional resonance: his grandfather died in a car accident in the early 1970s, leaving Roee’s grandmother to raise four young sons. These archive images—rare portraits of his grandfather, scenes from childhood, fragments of a family’s everyday life—are transformed, not erased. “The process felt like a dialogue,” he says, “not just with the images themselves, but with generations of my family and the very essence of memory.”

Though the photographs began as documentary traces, Painted Memories pushes them into the conceptual realm. Their transformation raises questions about the nature of photographic truth, the reliability of visual memory, and the blurred boundaries between artistic media. As painting and photography merge, so too do perception and remembrance.

Roee’s process is both intuitive and structured, developed through years of interdisciplinary experimentation. A sense of rawness is softened through layers of colour, light, and care. This is memory not as archive, but as re-imagination. An act of reclaiming.

Two quotes have shaped Roee’s thinking around this work. The first, from Marina Abramović, suggests that the artist’s task is not just to create but to unsettle: “The role of the artist is to make revolution, not to make art.” In Painted Memories, the revolution is perceptual. It is the re-seeing of familiar images through unfamiliar eyes.

A second quote he likes, from Allan Kaprow, reminds us that “Art is not just what you see on the wall; it is what happens between people.”

Roee’s work is exactly that—an invitation into shared emotional space. It’s not about the photograph or the painting alone, but the connection forged between them. And between the people in them and the viewer.