Ella Benami

About Ella Benami

I am an abstract painter, I explore how emotional and mental landscapes shape our existential experience. My practice investigates the subtle interplay between perception, creative emergent and how they meet our external world, often blending abstraction with elements from the natural environment.

My works gather around the desire to organize and create a certain kind of distinctiveness that would allude to systems of codes or symbols that seem to exist within structures of reality that are alternate to those we apprehend in our everyday lives.

My practice is rooted in pure abstraction, where I extensively explore ways of portraying non representational environments. Over time, I started incorporating other elements, particularly botanical motifs. This fusion of abstract with recognizable elements expresses my recognition in the inherent interconnectedness of the earthly and the spiritual, daily reality and the transcendental realm, consciousness and subconsciousness, everything coexists. In my new work over the past few years, this reciprocity is manifested also through incorporating photographic elements to my paintings.

During the past 2 and a half decades, I have delved deeply in my work into a field I like to call "landscapes of changing mind" My view is that mental landscapes or landscapes of consciousness must be located in a space, just as physical or three- dimensional landscapes are. This location is the basis for their existence and development. Our inability to distinguish and perceive this alternate space with our senses does not negate the validity of those mental realities that wish to realize value and meaning, independently of physical existence.

I enter a painting as though I had already somehow been transported into the non material realm and examine a certain landscape from the inside. Each time anew, I begin to render the particular landscape from the language and material that its environment both demands and provides me. Through these emerging landscapes, I investigate the boundaries of materiality versus non-materiality, the boundaries of perception and consciousness and the boundaries of my ability to communicate by means of various media with the world of observation.