Joshua Raz

Joshua Raz works mostly with oil on canvas, his paintings are marked by a complex interweaving of images and lines. The figures in his paintings are depicted either as merging into the surrounding landscape or serving as a connection between two levels of the landscape's strata, resulting in a sense of instability. Through the use of spliced landscapes and distorted perspectives, Raz questions the reliability of two-dimensional images and seeks to subvert their authority through a process of reinterpretation. Raz's paintings also embody a history of visual imagination, much like the land holds countless forgotten stories buried beneath the surface. He addresses a cultural change where the emphasis has shifted from placing importance on external facts to valuing individual emotions as a means of defining reality. By depicting different characters experiencing the same moment within the same landscape, Raz explores the impact of individual experiences on one's internal representation of a place. "As an artist who includes people within my work, I hope that my paintings hint at anthropological peculiarities," Raz says.