Guy Yanai

GUY YANAI

GUY YANAI

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

GUY YANAI: ÉLAN VITAL

By Ara H. Merjian

“I want to give as little as possible. . . . I want your brain to finish it.”

For all the lush color of Guy Yanai’s canvases, his work belongs to a fundamentally subtractive lineage in modernist painting. From Cézanne and Matisse, to de Chirico and Ozenfant, to Reinhardt and Newman, we can trace a loose genealogy of studied pictorial impoverishment, of a willful distillation of imagery—one not always inimical, in the event, to linear precision. If its optical pleasures appear to indulge in the oblivion of contemporary (and abidingly postmodern) life, Yanai’s paintings frame objects with a discipline worthy of the most fastidious modernist draftsmen.

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Of course, pleasure had its place in modernism, too. To wit, Henri Matisse’s (in) famous remark that painting should offer visual comforts in which “the businessman as well as the man of letters” might find repose, as if in a cozy armchair. The plump armchair of Yanai’s 1982 (2017) pays homage to another artist, David Hockney, who derived from Matisse some similar lessons. The visual gratifications of Yanai’s paintings, however, are inextricable from their obverse: an implicit meditation—by way of tight, taut brush strokes intermeshed together—on the ways that images reach us today. As beholden to the virtual imagery of the internet as to the history of modernism, Yanai’s work proves beguilingly complex despite—or rather, precisely in—its congenial simplicity.

Whether facing a Parisian boulevard or the coast at Rayol-Canadel-sur-Mer, France, the wrought iron balconies and French windows prevalent in Yanai’s paintings—as well as the richly chromatic scenes they frame—inevitably recall the Mediterraneaninfused paintings of Matisse (as much as they testify to the artist’s home city of Tel Aviv). It is an affinity that Yanai has courted.

David Hockney Mount Fuji and Flowers, 1972 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Mrs. Arthur Hays Sulzberger Gift, 1972 © David Hockney

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Not only has he made pilgrimages to the French painter’s former haunts near Nice, but works like Pink Studio (2014), The Piano Lesson (2017), and Still Life with Aubergines (after Matisse) (2019) flaunt this self-appointed apprenticeship. His study of Matisse is not limited to explicit imitations or pastiches, however; it inflects Yanai’s conflations of pictorial surfaces and spaces. Both End of Europe (Geographically) (2015) and End of Europe Siracusa (2017), for example, set potted plants before— or is it under?—what look like pictures hanging on a wall, though these might also be screens of some sort.

The “decorative” thrust of Matisse’s and Pierre Bonnard’s paintings quite purposefully confused the spatial propriety and hierarchy of adjoining planes. Such a strategy appears to be taken up not only in Yanai’s Still Life with Aubergines, but also in images like the recent Charlotte (2019), in which a wayward swatch of light blue refuses to assimilate to its surroundings, whether the room in which it appears vaguely contained or the dark grey patterning of the picture plane.

While Yanai occasionally makes a few stray annotations in pencil when starting a painting, he eschews preparatory drawings. He has remarked, in this vein, upon his desire “to have such tension that if you take out one brushstroke, the painting will collapse.” Indeed, in the absence of any underdrawing or even preliminary sketch, the

Henri Matisse The Red Studio, 1911 Oil on canvas 71 1/4 x 72 1/4 inches 181 x 219.1 cm © 2019 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

paintings evince a taut, almost gridded interlocking of parts. So uniform is their application that they approach an almost geometric regularity in certain areas, stacked in patches by turns vertical and horizontal.

The slightly raised ridges between strokes conjure up the appearance of stitched fabric as much as painted canvas, evincing—on a material level—the proverbial tension after which Yanai strives. Coexisting with this tension is a general democratization of pictorial elements. Different, even ostensibly opposed, components receive very similar treatment by the artist’s brush: a slab of wood and its shadow, a boat’s wooden underside and its reflection in water, a house’s sun-soaked roof and its shaded flank.

These all appear by dint of regular (and seemingly regulated) strokes of predominantly horizontal orientation, occasionally met by vertical counterparts.

In this regard, once again, Yanai carries aloft the mantle of various modernist masters. Cézanne’s canvases first proposed an utter equivalence between positive and negative space, protrusion and recession, a leaf and the air surrounding it.

In Yanai’s paintings, the strokes delineating a sky ablush with the fading light of day appear nearly identical to those limning the mountaintop against which it is set— in pictorial and material substance, if not in hue. In Paul Cézanne’s paintings lay, too, the potential autonomy of paint as a visual phenomenon unto itself—a possibility

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taken up not only by the ensuing generation of avant-garde painters in Paris and elsewhere, but still widely pursued in contemporary painting a century and a half later.

Yet Yanai’s images reveal none of what Cézanne called passage—the interpenetration of pictorial components, of things and spaces. The areas of passage opened up by Cézanne’s brushwork appear to exfoliate the surface of the world (or, conversely, to congeal even the most immaterial and transparent of phenomena). Yanai’s strokes instead keep to separate, discreet envelopes. (Claire Climbing (2015)) is an exception that helps prove the rule.) To this extent, he plies a slightly different Post‑Impressionist path, one that extends from Georges Seurat to Henri Matisse, Robert Delaunay, and Roger de La Fresnaye (and much later, and in rather different ways, to Frank Stella and Chuck Close).

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Having studied Seurat’s work at the Salon des Indépendants 1905 retrospective, Delaunay proceeded to build upon the lessons of pointillism. He developed meatier and chunkier swatches of paint in contrasting hues, as in his Still Life with Parrot (1907) and Paysage au Disque (1906–7). While the Simultaneous Windows series (1912) draws undeniably from Cézannian passage in its interweaving of planes, Delaunay’s Simultaneous Disk (1912–13) sets his brushstrokes into separate envelopes of pictorial space. Yanai eschews the color contrasts that distinguished these experiments. Yet his work echoes the systematic (if shorter) bands of paint out of which Delaunay constructed his imagery. Furthermore, the paint dragged by each of Yanai’s strokes gathers on both sides of its path, such that a thin ridge separates them. These ridges catch light as it plays across the painting’s surface, and they also convey a sense of the oil’s materiality. Thus, while Yanai’s scenes evoke almost immutable repose, their individual pictorial units reveal, upon closer inspection, a degree of agitation and effervescence.

Regarding the temporality conveyed in his images, Yanai notes that “people see it as a frozen image, but because you can see the stroke . . . there is a sense of duration.”

The latter word inevitably conjures up the philosophy of Henri Bergson—of great consequence to the early twentieth century avant-garde upon which Yanai’s painting

draws, wittingly or not. Bergson’s theories of duration, flux, and élan vital spurred countless painters and sculptors to revise traditional evocations of time and space, by means of intersecting planes, overlapping edges, or rippling, interpenetrating lines suggestive of sustained temporality. If, as I discussed above, Yanai’s images eschew the interpenetration of planes initiated in Cézanne’s work, their material and plastic units throb with a striking vitality.

Even still, it is not a sense of duration or dynamism by which Yanai’s paintings distinguish themselves. It is, instead, a setting of the world into a kind of pictorial abeyance.

As much as his brushstrokes vibrate on their canvases, they mediate their objects of depiction with a notable degree of remove—both in terms of individual passages of painting and the way the scene is conceived. Yanai self-confessedly bases some of his works upon images gleaned online, whether from Google Earth or Trip Advisor.

They thus retain a whiff of the middle-class banalities—of diversion and recreation—to which the original images attest. Yanai also notably describes his paintings’ incorporations of past sources—from Piero della Francesca to contemporary internet imagery—as “remixing.” His affinity for ancient mosaics is of a piece with his use of digitalized photography.

The latter might be thought of as a twenty-first century gloss on the benday dots out of which Roy Lichtenstein constructed his images: singular, abstract units from which entire images are wrought in newsprint facsimile. That Andy Warhol troped a somewhat similar concept in his paint-by-numbers series is no surprise. For, the dramatically increased mediacy of the visual world in the 1960s—a passing of reality through the baffle of reproductive technologies—presaged the late twentieth century explosion of imagery in digital format. Notwithstanding the crystal-clear resolution of even the highest quality digital images today, their licked surfaces belie a matrix of countless individual pixels. Even, or especially, at their most plainly handmade, Yanai’s paintings call attention to that fact.

An Italian critic recently deemed Yanai’s work “(quasi) pop” in nature. Indeed, given its subject matter and chromatic intensity, it is no coincidence that Yanai’s work

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has been featured in exhibitions examining the impact of pop art on postwar Israeli aesthetics, for example. His own extensive residence in the United States—having moved from Haifa to Boston in the mid-1980s—means that his experience of Pop Art’s legacies was firsthand rather than filtered. Yet the particular representational mediations that Pop Art appropriated and thematized in the 1960s—photography, advertising, television—appear rather quaint today in an age of cyber technologies.

Yanai’s work has thus also, not surprisingly, been figured in exhibitions on so-called Post Analog Painting, which considered the inexorable influence of contemporary technology upon recent art.

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Of course, such analogies only get us so far in examining the actual images. Yanai’s indirect method of painting remains, ultimately, a facet of human affect and agency as much as an oblique rumination on the proliferation of digital representation.

Localized effects—whether light reflected on objects and surfaces, or tonal gradations—appear on his canvases in the form of lighter color bands or single strokes, placed at various angles. Visual and spatial contingencies, such as the sun’s glint off a window or blades of grass, are thus figured by way of a representational shorthand.

Yanai’s professed admiration for Piero and Fra Angelico derive, tellingly, not from the Renaissance masters’ respective approaches to realism, but rather from the “synthetic” aspect of their representations of nature. To be sure, we find in some images—as in the pale blue sky of Worcester (2017), or in the pink cladding of Almine Rech Courtyard (2019)—nuances of tone suggesting atmospheric variations of light and shade. Yanai generally favors the near-abstraction of stylized, solid streaks, however. In Reina Sofia Calder (2019), they fleck the flattened green foliage to the right and left of the triangular sculpture. Yet at the painting’s upper right and left these bands detach from any object per se. In a painting such as Ancienne Rive (A Tree and a Cave) (2015), the colored bands take on a pictorial life of their own, unhinged from any depictive duties whatsoever.

Indeed, Yanai regularly flirts with outright abstraction. The floral arabesques of Matisse’s forest-green folding screen are rendered—in Still Life with Aubergines—in a set of light blue, schematic diagonals; the teacher in Yanai’s gloss on The Piano

Philip Guston Untitled (Rome), 1971 Oil on paper 22 x 29 3/4 inches 55.8 x 75.5 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bequest of Musa Guston, © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Lesson is likewise distilled to just a few schematic lines. Consciously or not, Yanai repeatedly underscores both the flatness of his canvases and the components that fill their surfaces. The shrubbery flanking Alexander Calder’s Carmen (1974) in Reina Sofia Calder are rendered as flat and geometric as the colored panels comprising the tree-like kinetic artwork. In the elementary dimensions of their figuration, Nothing (Drive in) (2013) and Pink Box on Bad Girl (2014) call to mind some of Philip Guston’s work of the early 1970s, when he returned—after years as a leading Abstract Expressionist—to figuration, to the shock of many New York critics. Several of these works consisted simply of cube-like shapes set upon (or hovering above) a shallow ledge, in the absence of any attendant shadows. In their shadowless play of angular surfaces and geometries, many of Yanai’s domestic spaces—such as his Kitchen series—conduct oblique dialogues with interior scenes by other compelling contemporary painters, such as Farah Atassi.

Placing the eaves of a gabled roof against a uniformly blue sky (or is it, instead, a ship’s prow and deck piercing an expanse of water?), Yanai’s No Title (2015) reduces its object of representation to a bare minimum, allowing the expanse of colored canvas to emerge as the image’s true subject. Heart (2014) takes this distillation even further, rendering a black geometric shape inside a wonky green quadrilateral, set in turn against a field of pale blue. With Almine Rech Courtyard, Yanai combines two prominent motifs of his work up until this point: architectural (usually residential)

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depictions and potted plants. While he has traditionally rendered the latter in solitary form, each studied in a particular locale, here he clusters several together. Despite a few realist flourishes (such as the reflection of one plant’s branch in the building’s window), the painting draws the eye to the six square planters sitting on a thin strip of green. Their geometric curiosity is echoed, in turn, in the quadrangular brushwork of the courtyard’s pink wall.

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For all its seemingly hedonistic formalism (or is it formalist hedonism?), Yanai’s painting sinks its roots not simply in the history of art or the digital present; it also draws upon fonts of literary inspiration: from the French psychoanalyst and author J.B. Pontalis, to the autobiographical musings of Vladimir Nabokov, to Alberto Moravia’s novels.

Moravia’s Contempt (1954) finds itself—in Yanai’s eponymous 2014 painting—mediated through Jean-Luc Godard’s film by the same name, set in part in Adalberto Libera’s extraordinary Casa Malaparte. French New Wave cinema informs a number of Yanai’s images, in fact, particularly his series based upon Éric Rohmer’s film, Claire’s Knee (1970). Depicting a woman’s leg prominently flexed on a ladder—her torso and face cropped out of the image—a few eponymous paintings depict the famed, fetishized body part in question, rendered in Rohmer’s film a narrative trope not without humor.

Yanai’s paintings make over stills from the film (the director’s second feature in color) into an elliptical scene in its own right, particularly for those unfamiliar with the film.

So too does the recent Lake Annecy (2019) take the film’s setting as its touchstone, injecting a human presence into Yanai’s characteristically saturated landscapes—a scene at once anecdotal in its allusion to Rohmer’s precedent, and absorbed in its own sensual evocation.

Ara H. Merjian is a professor of Italian studies and an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

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The Standard West Hollywood, 2019

Oil on canvas 59 x 47 1/4 inches 150 x 120 cm

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Still Life with Aubergines (after Matisse), 2019 Oil on canvas 59 x 47 1/4 inches 150 x 120 cm

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Almine Rech Courtyard, 2019

Oil on canvas 70 7/8 x 78 3/4 inches 180 x 200 cm

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Charlotte, 2019 Oil on canvas 59 x 47 1/4 inches 150 x 120 cm

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Gilboa St Living Room, 2019

Oil on canvas 70 7/8 x 78 3/4 inches 180 x 200 cm

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Lake Annecy, 2019

Oil on canvas 63 x 74 7/8 inches 160 x 190 cm

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Lisbon Plant, 2019 Oil on canvas 70 7/8 x 55 1/8 inches 180 x 140 cm

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Prada Foundation, 2019

Oil on canvas 63 x 74 7/8 inches 160 x 190 cm

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Rayol, 2019 Oil on canvas 59 x 47 1/4 inches 150 x 120 cm

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Reina Sofia Calder, 2019

Oil on canvas 59 x 47 1/4 inches 150 x 120 cm

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Teenager On Boat, 2019

Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches 40 x 30 cm

Lost Friend Plant, 2019

Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches 40 x 30 cm

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Old Banana, 2019 Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches 40 x 30 cm

Sailboat, 2019 Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches 40 x 30 cm

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Germany, 2019 Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches 40 x 30 cm

Flowers, 2019 Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches 40 x 30 cm

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Roof Balcony Plant, 2019 Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches 40 x 30 cm

Sentimental Salina, 2019

Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 7/ 8 inches 40 x 30 cm

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Orange House, 2019

Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches 40 x 30 cm

Sailing East, 2019

Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches 40 x 30 cm

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Pink Sky Sentimental, 2019

Oil on canvas 51 1/8 x 39 3/8 inches 130 x 100 cm

ARTIST NAME TITLE GOES HERE, IF ANY

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

GUY YANAI Born in Haifa, Israel in 1977 Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel

EDUCATION 2000 BFA, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA 1997 New York Studio School, New York, NY 1996 Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, Pont-Aven, France

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1996 Parsons School of Design, New York, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2015 “Ordinary Things,” Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel “Ancienne Rive,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY 2014 “Diary,” Galerie Derouillon, Paris, France “First Battle Lived Accident,” Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel 2013 “Accident Nothing,” Aran Cravey Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Lived and Laughed and Loved and Left,” LaMontagne Gallery, Boston, MA “Battle, Therapy, Living Room,” (curated by Noam Segel), Velan Center for Contemporary Art, Turin, Italy 2011 “First We Feel Then We Fall,” Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel 2010 “Four Guys Sitting in a Subaru Drinking Grapejuice,” (curated by Alon Segev), The Spaceship on HaYarkon 70, Tel Aviv, Israel

2019 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY “Sentimental Spring,” SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC “The Conformist,” Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France

1999 “Thesis: Easthampton Interiors,” Hampshire College Art Gallery, Amherst, MA

2018 “Boy On an Island,” Galerie Conrads, Düsseldorf, Germany

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2017 “Barbarian in the Garden,” Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles, CA “Speak, America,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY “Calm European,” Flatland Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands “Love of Beginnings,” Galerie Derouillon, Paris, France 2016 “Fox Hill Road,” Rod Barton Gallery, Brussels, Belgium “Mademoiselle Albertine est Partie! Kaye Donachie and Guy Yanai,” (curated by Timothée Chaillou), Appartement, Paris, France

2019 “Door into Summer/M’s Collection +,” Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo, Japan “Domestic Comfort,” Flatland Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands “YUMMY YUMMY,” Flatland Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands “Betaland,” Galerie Conrads, Düsseldorf, Germany 2018 “I Dream My Painting and Then I Paint My Dream,” UNIT 5, Los Angeles, CA

“The Barn Show 2018,” Johannes Vogt Gallery, East Hampton, NY “As You Like It / C’est comme vous voulez,” Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles, CA “Jerry, Show Me Love!,” Galerie Derouillon, Paris, France “Reflector,” Luciana Brito - NY Project, New York, NY “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2017 “L’anti-destin,” (curated by Pauline Pavec and Quentin Derouet, in collaboration with Galerie Derouillon, Galerie Helenbeck, and Pierre and Alexandre Lorquin), 64 rue de Monceau, Paris, France “Surreal House,” The Pill, Istanbul, Turkey “Post Analog Painting II,” The Hole, New York, NY 2016 “Taste my braindrops,” Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL “What’s Up 2.0,” (curated by Lawrence van Hagen), London, United Kingdom “Tableaux,” Tristian Koenig, Melbourne, Australia “The Ties That Bind,” David Achenbach Projects, Wuppertal, Germany “Cause the Grass Don’t Grow and the Sky Ain’t Blue,” Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France “From Andy Warhol to Contemporary Art: Culture, Color, Body,” Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel “Bisou Magique,” (curated by Yundler Brondino Verlag), Galerie Derouillon, Paris, France “Gardening,” Flatland Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands “Itch Under the Skin,” Charlotte Fogh Gallery, Aarhus, Denmark “Imagine,” Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy

“Informal Forms,” (curated by Noam Segel), Aran Cravey Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Just Before Brazil,” A.L.I.C.E. Gallery, Brussels, Belgium 2013 “GROWTH,” Charlotte Fogh Gallery, Aarhus, Denmark 2012 “Domesticated Souls,” (curated by Alice Van Dan Abeele), A.L.I.C.E. Gallery, Brussels, Belgium “The Irreconcilable,” The Spaceship on HaYarkon 70, Tel Aviv, Israel 2011 “Italy-Israel: Senses of the Mediterranean,” Milan, Italy and Tel Aviv, Israel “Possibility of a Book,” Sommer Contemporary Art S2, Tel Aviv, Israel 2010 “Israelism,” Shay Arye Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel 2008 “Recent Purchases from the Israel Discount Bank Collection,” Ashdod Museum of Art, Ashdod, Israel “Artist Portraits,” Givataim Municipal Gallery, Givataim, Israel

RESIDENCIES 2014 Villa Lena Residency Program, Tuscany, Italy

2015 “Launch,” Rod Barton Gallery, Brussels, Belgium “Fresh Fruit,” Les Gens Heureux, Copenhagen, Denmark “Words Without Letters,” (curated by Guy Yanai), Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel “Refiguring,” Coburn Projects, London, United Kingdom

2012 Artist Contemporary Art Fund, Professional Development Workshop by Creative Capital

2014 “Par Ici Mon Kiki,” Le Coeur, Paris, France “Summer Mixer,” Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY

2008 Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, Belgium

2009 Upstate Workspace (Zach Feuer Gallery), Hudson, NY

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

GUY YANAI 5 September – 5 October 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2019 Ara H. Merjian Page 9 Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY Photography by Elad Sarig Photography, Tel Aviv, Israel Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-17-5 Cover: Rayol, (detail), 2019