You adjust your mouth, your body right before a photograph is taken. Anticipating the image, a smile stretches across your face or an expression is temporarily held. Navot Miller is interested in the moment after, when the facade is released. His paintings capture his life as it’s happening in a bathroom, at the beach, or overhearing a phone call on a balcony. 

Miller paints straightforward pictures of his friends and lovers, but the colors and compositions are striking. Looking at fluorescent pink swaths of oil on canvas in his studio makes my eyes feel like they’re biting into the first mango of the season. Adam in the hilton in midtown (2023) is a bright painting measuring 78.75 x 67 in. Striped curtains are drawn in a hotel room. Underwear is on the floor. A man with a towel around his waist is pointing to something outside with his left index finger. The balcony door is ajar, its red frame splits the landscape in two. On the left is a skyscraper with windows patterned in a quilt of blue pixels. A pink sky envelops the NY cityscape to the right. We observe the painting like Miller might have observed the man’s gesture. 

Initially the artist planned to study architecture, which is apparent in how he constructs space on canvas, and now in his recent designs. Born in Israel and based in Berlin, Miller began working with furniture and Jewish ritual objects for his exhibition A Pink Shul (2024) at Wannsee Contemporary. Paintings and drawings were displayed with a matching pastel pink synagogue pew and Chanukiah (nine-branched candelabra) with blue, red, yellow, green, and orange trimming. Miller’s designs are reminiscent of Memphis Design and Ocean Drive. The artist dreams of building a pink synagogue, and I can picture it in Miami.