Tom Fima | A Manicure Being the Cheapest Option You’ve Come Up with to Keep Your Darkness at Bay | July 3rd – August 22nd

Tom Fima | A Manicure Being the Cheapest Option You’ve Come Up with to Keep Your Darkness at Bay

Tom Fima (b. 1996) is a painter, a graduate of the Barcelona Academy of Art (BAA), and holds a BA from the Department of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University. Her work is characterized by a close and intimate gaze interested in female presence.

Her painting language stems from a realistic and academic tradition that emphasizes visual integrity and skill, combining precision and discipline with moments of bravura— confident yet free brushstrokes with material presence and descriptive power. This language is not a display of force for its own sake, despite its virtuoso qualities, but rather an expression of the artist’s deep interest in the craft of painting itself. With Fima, as well as among part of the younger generation in a variety of fields, the concept of mastery is a value, reflecting a renewed longing for a direct connection between human, material, and creation in a world that is becoming increasingly digital and automated, mediated and controlled by screens and artificial intelligence, and overly saturated with images.

In Fima’s work, the arena of action is usually the domestic space, mostly the bedroom or the living room in her apartment; the time is close to the present- now, last night, or not long ago; the light source originates from within the room itself, it is artificial, uniform, and at times harsh; all the characters are young women of the artist’s age, belonging to her social circle and immediate environment; the focus of the painting is on the relationship between the body and the textile: the body (the gaze, the posture, the exposed skin) and the fabrics (the lace, folds, red thread); the actions are minimal, passive, and slack (lying, sprawling, leaning, sitting), and they seem to lack purpose or narrative. All of these infuse Fima’s paintings with an emotional expression that has a quiet yet tense quality of suspension, staring, introspection, detachment, or minute preoccupation, resting in a sort of hypnagogia (the state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep) or hypnopompia (the state of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness) as a contemporary existential state.

“A Manicure Being the Cheapest Option You’ve Come Up with to Keep Your Darkness at Bay,”¹ María Gainza described in one of the short stories in Optic Nerve, her book dealing with the aesthetic dimension through the biographical layer and the relationship between looking at art and life. The manicure is simultaneously an adornment, a self-indulgence, and a minute, everyday aesthetic act; but it is also a gesture of control, precision, and self-care made within a threatening and “dark” reality. “On the one hand, the method usually works, keeping you in the present, focused on a tiny fraction of yourself,” the author reasoned, as one describing the act of painting -holding form, presence, and meaning through attention, and concluded: “A slight confusion, a simple lifting of the brush, is enough for you to immediately fall captive to the charm of ruins.” Well, Tom Fima’s work unfolds at this time facing the charm of ruins, between the manicure brush and the painter’s brush.

In a world where images are created and swallowed in an instant, Tom Fima creates out of a belief in the specific gravity of painting to generate an image, a figure, and a presence. The women in her paintings do nothing grand, but they are present, simply there. And this is precisely the wish of her painting, to succeed in what no other image can today: to remain.

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¹ María Gainza, Optic Nerve, translated from Spanish by Rinat Shnaydover, Tel Aviv: Nine Lives Press, 2025, p. 57.