Curated by: Ariel Rom Cohen
Edit Ben Gida’s first solo exhibition seeks to examine the concept of beauty through a feminine perspective, engaging with the tension between attraction, preservation, decay, and the desire for eternity. Ben Gida’s works, created through oil painting and charcoal drawing, move between meticulous realism and surreal, enigmatic imagery, exploring how ideals of beauty are constructed, replicated, and preserved throughout visual history.
At the center of the exhibition are female figures depicted in intimate facial close-ups, surrounded by organic halos composed of insects, wings, vegetation, and hybrid elements. At times, the figures themselves appear transformed into hybrid creatures; suspended between the human and the supernatural, between a living body and a preserved object. Through these images, Ben Gida destabilizes the perception of beauty as a fixed or eternal value, revealing it instead as a cultural mechanism shaped by desire, fear, and control.
The works draw inspiration from ancient Egyptian aesthetics and tragic mythological figures such as Medusa, the Siren, and Ophelia. Much like ancient civilizations preserved scarabs, mummies, or ritual objects, the female faces here resemble archaeological relics, adorned with gold, insects, shells, and flowers, positioned somewhere between an amulet and a funerary ornament. The use of ephemeral motifs (“Éphémère” in French – something transient, fleeting, or existing only briefly), such as butterflies and bees whose lifespans are fragile and short, emphasizes the transience embedded within beauty itself and humanity’s persistent attempt to resist the passage of time.
The dark backgrounds and almost fossilized textures of the paintings create a tension between the delicacy of the faces and sensations of decay and preservation. Through realistic aesthetics and near-idealized proportions, Ben Gida simultaneously glorifies feminine beauty while critiquing the cultural obsession with preserving it. In a contemporary era dominated by technology, media, and the constant rewriting of aesthetic ideals, her works propose a reflection on beauty not as an absolute truth, but as a complex cultural construct, one that contains within it power, seduction,
fragility, and an awareness of mortality.
