Henri – a Black man, not young, slightly overweight – is a fictional figure, an imaginary companion, a male escort conjured by the artist Mirit Ben Nun. After dedicating the majority of her work to female empowerment—her vibrant paper compositions celebrating elegant, impeccably styled career women, including a recurring, flamboyant, and provocative self-portrait—she suddenly found, midway through life, that a mysterious man had entered her painted world. Out of nowhere, without warning, Henri is back in town—and he’s spending time with Mirit! They embrace, they dance, they press cheek to cheek with a suspicious intimacy. Are they truly a couple?
Mirit Ben Nun lives her daily life amid sheets of paper and trays overflowing with acrylic markers and colorful oil pencils, all scattered across her kitchen table. She depletes or wears down thousands of them to fill white pages—typically A3-sized—with dense networks of decorative patterns that twist, intersect, weave together, and ornament the radiant figures that emerge from them. Through sleepless nights and long days, she draws with the obsessive drive of someone who discovered art independently—without formal training—yet who knows, with certainty, that painting is her life’s essence and the reason for her existence.
That urgency is apparent in her saturated compositions, glowing color palettes, sensuality, and sheer joy in the act of creation. The parade of models she portrays responds to urban life, to TikTok screens, Instagram, and the glamorous digital-Hollywood realm. She reveres celebrity culture, exaggerating its obsession with image, posing, and glitz to the point of parody.
At the same time, Mirit’s women celebrate themselves: they soar, rebel, provoke, stick fingers in eyes and noses, serving as shifting alter egos for the artist herself. In this context, the appearance of Henri—who is neither youthful nor muscular, not tall nor fashionably dressed, but rather aging, overweight, and rumpled—offers an ironic counterpoint to the idealized fantasies of happiness and perfection so common in the world of imagined avatars.
Henri is Back in Town is also a generic line from an old American Western—but here, it becomes something else: a shadow figure, an alternative presence in Mirit Ben Nun’s kitchen-studio. In a series of text-based works, she engages in a private dialogue with the institutional art world—one that continues to overlook her and her decorative art, yet cannot silence her relentless drive to express her singular voice.
Tali Tamir
