Opinion: Guy Yanai at Harper’s
Looking at the happy, bright-colored paintings of Guy Yanai, an Israeli artist who has taken over the first floor of Harper’s Books in East Hampton through mid-December, a viewer might be tempted to decide they were a cross-pollinated canvas offspring of the visions of Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Diebenkorn, and David Hockney.
The bright, warm-weather scenes, on view for the last couple of months, might feel out of season, but they are also warming and festive. The representational compositions of sunny-day activities and seaside places are knowable but distanced. The artist paints in bands that make the subject matter appear to be viewed through Venetian blinds, perhaps, or the horizontal bands of a video screen.
Like stock images or postcards, the paintings of sailboats and a lighthouse could be trite, but Mr. Yanai’s way of transforming them into his own visual language becomes a rigorous formal exercise. The shadows a sailboat casts don’t always match the expected reflections on the water. The background behind a houseplant doesn’t match up from side to side. The plants themselves are often spindly and devoid of foliage. They are not there to be pretty.
Mr. Yanai actively cultivates contradictions. He says his paintings should be both representative and nonrepresentational. He captures the essence of things in a way that would never be mistaken for a replication of an object. Despite the holiday-snapshot appeal of some of the subjects, there’s an ironic distance to them. Viewers are always aware that they are looking at an interpretation of a landscape, a seascape, a building, or a plant.
The artist takes his subjects from images, things he might see on a screen or on a wall, or that he takes from life. He actively redefines them and makes them his own. The bright colors and neutral expression may seem superficial, but they are also personal.
His relationship to the objects he paints may be devoid of meaning or deeply symbolic. The strategies he employs are distancing, yet he recognizes it. “Objects touch a very deep part in our psyche . . . that recognizable object gives us an ontological security,” he said in an interview.
This is why the paintings work on several levels. They can be pleasant and atmospheric — objects that engage quickly and quietly — or they can pull viewers into their layers, enchanting them with their forms and motives, striations, and strong verticals.