GUY YANAI: YOUR WORLD NOT MINE
KÖNIG GALERIE presents YOUR WORLD NOT MINE by Guy Yanai. His work features mundane motifs such as portraits, flowers, modernist interiors, idyllic landscapes, and stills from French films.
July 5 - September 1, 2024
The sources and synthesis underlying these pieces do not form a logical or thematic whole. Despite this thematic incoherence, the show forms an organic body of work, marked by clarity in form, power of will, and a spirit of resilience. As the artist himself says, “This show affirms once again the power of painting (both the noun and the verb) to transform our relation to life.”
YOUR WORLD NOT MINE was produced between Marseille and Tel Aviv. Over the past eight months, the artist has continually traveled between these cities for personal and logistical reasons. In one text exchange with his wife, Yanai was complaining about all the forces that seemed to be against their marriage.
Yanai continues in his trajectory of the past few years. Recurring sources such as the films of Eric Rohmer (of which Gene Hackman said, “I watched a Rohmer film, it was like watching paint dry”), the writings of Marcel Proust and Michel Houellebecq, and the oeuvre of artist Cy Twombly permeate the work and feel of the painting.
One of the central works in the show is REINETTE AND ERIC, PARIS, in which we see Rohmer and actress Joelle Miquel during the filming of "Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle" (1987) in Paris. The film, which has influenced dozens of Yanai's paintings over the years, tells the story of two girls with different backgrounds and worldviews and their encounters via art.
The show also includes a series of small-scale still lifes. Yanai has long been fascinated by flowers and their transient beauty and vitality. This time, his flower paintings are complemented by the work A BLONDE WOMAN (AFTER PALMA VECCHIO). Yanai appropriates the image of the same-titled painting from the 16th century, making it his own with his specific painting style of strict, almost geometrical lines.
Guy Yanai’s paintings capture frozen moments – glimpses of the past, empty rooms, and objects imbued with a sense of presence, stills from films that, taken out of context, become symbolic. The enigma of his work lies at the intersection of the pleasure of painting (both as a noun and a verb), melancholia, and a profound sense of longing and not belonging.