Lior Vantrel did not start out wanting to be an artist.

As a child, they were more interested in collecting things—rusted keys, broken tiles, scraps of paper washed up along the shoreline near their home. Each object felt like it belonged to a story that had been interrupted.

One afternoon, after a storm, Lior found a water-damaged photograph half-buried in the sand. The faces were blurred, the edges torn, but something about it lingered. They took it home and tried to redraw what they thought the missing parts looked like.

It didn’t look “correct.” But it felt right.

That was the first time Lior realized art didn’t have to preserve reality—it could rebuild it.

They began sketching constantly, filling notebooks with imagined versions of real things: houses that no longer stood, people they barely remembered, places that felt familiar but didn’t exist. Over time, sketches turned into paintings, layered and reworked, never fully finished.

In school, teachers called their work “unclear.” Lior disagreed.

To them, the blur was the point.

Because memory was never sharp.

And art, they decided, shouldn’t be either.