120

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This series, which includes one hundred and twenty small scale portrait paintings, featured female prostitutes and their "Johns". as they are observed from from the artist’s studio window view. The studio is located on the ruins of the old central bus station in  South Tel-Aviv. Noam examines the characters through the window as they are leaning against the wall, sitting on the pavement, in the street surrounding and in between stopping cars. Her subjects are semi-passive: drinking coffee, conversing, smoking cigarettes, resting  in a basic existing mode. Most of them are in a waiting stage - a convenient time to be looked at and painted.

 

Art history gossip tells us  that a lot of an artist’s models were in fact prostitutes - as it is suspected in Caravaggio’s Madonna in The Death of the Virgin (c. 1601-6) and is known for a fact in the case of Manet’s Olympia (1863). Degas little dancers were also pimped in the sex industry. In this context of Painting: Venus is a prostitute and Marry is not just Maria Magdalena. In fact, every woman represented in a religious or mythological scene could have been a prostitute in reality. In these 120 paintings, the women working as prostitutes are used as painting subjects, only to be looked at without the potential of being bought as paintings.

 

Noam is using the models available in her surroundings, although the distance between them does not allow accurate and punctilious attribute. The outcome therefore is something between a portrait and a model study. In the painting only a character is captured.

 

A statuette in a standing pose differs in clothing and other external characteristics. The frames show subjects who are unaware of the camera and positioned far away. As opposed to other "artistic" projects that deal with representing the unrepresented in society, here there’s an  effort to get the individual who is transparent. It is customary to photograph a large up-close-and-personal portrait of the subject. It’s an obvious tactic and most direct in order to create visibility to the "invisible" in society. However, this does not necessarily serve the purpose of individuality  but instead creates a “poster-child” of the subject, by using imagery borrowed from advertising. Yet, Noam’s painting style is raw and concise. At times it’s with a strong colour palate and confident brush strokes which create form and volume with a few lines and patches of colours. Because of the restrictions of format and distance, clothing become a dominant characteristics to attribute to the characters: revealing or covered, patterned or in print, from winter to summer season, with accessories like umbrellas, raincoats, and bags. In the paintings we see women with brunette, blonde, curly and straight hair, dark and light skin, full bodied and thin, attractive and less attractive, dressed sporty and sexy.

This is in a complete contrast to photos shown on sex-advertising cards featuring super slim porno industry looking models wearing vinyl and stilettos, offering discreet intimacy. The every-woman depiction exposes the reality of prostitution hard and banal. Women who did not choose their fate, who are someone’s sister, mother, daughter. Women who may be a lot of other things and each one is an entire world - the aim is not to try and represent them to one positive goal. It’s an effort to avoid passing judgment - to visualize them in a way that is not affected by their class and status, with directness and integrity, presented as a form of social realism.