In the ever-evolving world of art, artist Ariel Babinsky has managed to emerge as a beacon of authentic expression.
Capturing honesty is no easy task. Human experience is complex, and rendering truth requires a careful eye. Somehow Ariel Babinsky manages to funnel relatable life experiences into his artistic creations in drawing, painting, photography and film.
Born in Israel in 1981, Babinsky studied political science at Columbia University in New York. Through living in the East Village and traveling across small town America, he gained insight into what his art aims to represent: the most simple moments are actually complex: the more raw and unembellished, the more honest and deep. His portraits are collages created with a combination of book pages, torn images, acrylic and charcoal. They depict men, in some levels of undress, their gaze introspective, questionable, raw. It’s a portal into privacy. The viewer becomes a kind of a voyeur, witnessing a personal, intimate moment.
Come And Get It No. 8 (2020)
110x90cm (43.3x35.4in)
“I want to leave something that is a record of something else. To distill an experience, which is otherwise very complex. To just show it.”
It’s his unique approach to each piece that sets him apart. Grounded in simplicity – a concept he attributes to his early artistic influences – Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the literary voice of J.D. Salinger – he strives to communicate directly with his audience. Warhol’s immediacy, Basquiat’s instinct, and Salinger’s unembellished directness, have all left an indelible mark on his creative outlook. It’s this ethos of simplicity – of stripping away the superfluous to reveal the core of the human condition – that defines Babinsky’s work.
Come And Get It No. 2 (2019)
70x100cm (27.5x39.3in)
Painting: The Preparation For The Ritual Is The Ritual
Babinsky’s process is a delicate balance between discovery and creation. He always begins with a found image that strikes a chord with him. “Sometimes something touches me,” he explains, “and I want to leave it as a record because I think it’s really amazing.” That found image serves as the foundation for what will become a complex interplay of color, texture and form.
Nikita (2022)
70x100cm (27.5x39.3in)
After creating his initial collage, Babinsky then uses acrylic paint and charcoal to layer, highlight or obscure elements of the original image, breathing new life into it, yet keeping it connected to the source material. This process is not just about the act of creation for him. It’s a ritual of preservation, a way to immortalize fleeting moments of beauty and significance that might otherwise fade into obscurity. Simply put, he wants to show what it is that he finds beautiful, what he wants to be remembered.
“I very often find myself thinking that if I don’t do something with it, it’d be forgotten. That’s why I have to do it. Because nobody’d see it unless I do.”
Babinsky explains that he doesn’t really enjoy the process of creation. It’s a difficult, time-consuming experience that drains his energy. And as a perfectionist, he won’t stop until it’s done. However, he does enjoy the final result. And he’s not the only one. A Greek art collector commissioned a painting of the Crown Prince of Dubai, Sheikh Hamdan.
King Fazza (2021)
120x120cm (47.2x47.2in)
The painting depicts the Crown Prince in a marble-esque deep-coral collage with cracks across the surface. The cracks give around one of his eyes, revealing the truth beneath the facade: what he actually looks like behind the mask. You see the color of his skin, the iris, the eyebrow. It’s the main focal point in the image.
As a member of the royal family – and heavily in the public eye – it’s likely the Crown Prince wears a mask, a carefully contrived image to present to the people. And yet Babinsky’s image urges us to consider that there is another person beneath the surface; one deeper, raw. It’s the nature of identity, of what is left when you take everything else away.
Every Man Jack (2022)
50x40cm (19.6x15.7in)
Photography: An Exhibitionist Is Nothing Without A Voyeur
With his photography, Babinsky portrays masked men from various angles. All are shirtless, some are completely nude, but each are posed in a way that they are partially in frame, and partially out of it. His photographs have a VHS effect, almost as if the image is a still from a video, one from the 70s even. Faded colors. Hints of lime green and plum-purple lining the edges.
Still from The King Jason Series
© Private Collection, Greece
To say the least, the photographs are jarring. They give a sense that you’re viewing something you’re not supposed to. A still from a personal sex tape, perhaps? No. More like a personal photograph you’d share only with those you trust. For that reason, you wonder: Do I dare look at this? And yet, you can’t look away, and can’t help but wonder who these men are, and why they’re hiding their identities behind a mask.
In fact, the one figure whose genitals we do see (cropped below), is the only man who discarded his mask, except his face is now hidden behind his arm. His features are obscured as he leans over, seemingly in shame. Again, Babinsky confronts the raw vulnerability of self-identity. The man who shows the most, who has taken the leap to discard his mask, still can’t show his face. For me, it creates an interesting dilemma: the more vulnerable we become, the more we have to hide, because sometimes what’s real is just too much.
Still from The King Jason Series
© Private Collection, Greece
Film: Shoot First And Call Whatever You Hit ‘The Target’
In many ways, his videography is an extension of his pieces, a confrontation of the rawness of human life. His experimental shorts and his longer, full-length pieces, bring something different to the focal point of art. Like his photographs, each film has the same VHS filter effect, which creates the illusion that this is a piece of film you wouldn’t find in theaters, but instead in someone’s personal vault.
When Babinsky first transitioned to film, he started by putting a camera in front of his actors and just allowing them to speak their mind. And while he describes them as actors, he admits that the goal was not for them to act, but to allow them to speak. “That’s why I have to catch a moment with them,” he explains. “They can do something amazing in front of the camera, but they can only do it once, and you have to catch that ‘one time’. It cannot be recreated.”
Still from Rags to Riches
© Ariel Babinsky Ltd
Babinsky then graduated to writing scripts. In ‘Rags to Riches’, his first full-length experimental film, the actress acted out the script in front of the camera, reading the lines while directly addressing the lens. Eventually, his film process evolved to an actor performing with a voiceover of the script behind it. In ‘King Jason’, a man enters a room surrounded by Babisnky’s own paintings and then gradually disrobes. The voiceover, by a woman, plays as a stream of thought.
My personal interpretation? As the woman’s thoughts become more personal, more vulnerable, the actor discards more clothes until he’s fully nude, exposed as he faces the camera. It’s an exploration of the rawness of vulnerability. And yet whether or not this was Babinsky’s intention is unclear. Maybe that’s what makes his creation unique. It’s truly up to the viewer to decide what they see.
Although Babinsky edits his scripts extensively, he doesn’t touch the recordings. And that’s really the key to his film goals. Record realness, rawness. Humans talking about life.
Still from King Jason
© Ariel Babinsky Ltd
The Experience Of Being Alive
Babinsky refuses to ascribe a fixed meaning to his work. That reluctance is reflective of his belief in the subjective nature of art. He sees his creations as mirrors, reflecting back the viewers’ thoughts, feelings and interpretations. This philosophy underscores his approach to art as an authentic expression of life, devoid of pretense and showiness. In his own words, there’s no inherent meaning in art. It simply is.
“The meaning of the work is whatever the viewer gives it. When you look at a painting, whatever you feel, whatever you’re thinking, that’s the meaning of it.”
Golden State Warriors (2020)
80x120cm (31.4x47.2in)
As a self-proclaimed night owl, Babinsky’s creative process is marked by nights spent in deep contemplation and days filled with the physical act of creation. It’s a way of life, a means of engaging with the world around him.
Ultimately, he’s created a compelling narrative of exploration and reflection. Through his work, he invites us to strip away our preconceptions and just engage with it. It’s an invitation to see the world without pretense, to find beauty in the mundane, to recognize the complexity in simplicity.
King Tomas (2021)
170x140cm (66.9x55.1in)