First one person show
Yoav Hanan exhibits in his first one-person show three series of photographs. Each of the series reveals a kinship to another field of experiences, another network of concepts, and other connotations from the spheres of culture and art. Each series creates its own world of contents, yet from the conceptual infrastructure of the exhibition emerges a unifying texture to all three series originating from their creator – the photographer’s eye. Hanan was the first physical site where these worlds blended, and now they unfurl separately under the umbrella of a single exhibition, Yoav Hanan first one-person show.
The first series consists of several photographs, some of which are presented in the exhibition. This series also includes tow long black strips that arouse a strong emotional reaction. Emerging from the black background, spiral formations emit a yellow light that seems to emanate from a remote source. The spiral formations are evocative of the concept “vertebra” or “link” with all its associations: human, vertebra, animal vertebra, or links to a chain. These photographs convey archaic mystery and primordial landscape along with a rather contemporary, basically post-modern, hi-tech technological clarity. The tow-dimensional flatness of the photograph has been cancelled, and we are swept into and swallowed by the space world presented to us, a world that conveys both a kind of humanity and a sense of chill and alienation emanating from the mist surrounding the photographs.
The second series consists of treated photographs presenting human silhouettes in different postures against a background of three rings. The well-known Hebrew saying, “for man is a tree of a field”, has been provided with an unusual visual illustration. The photographs have become X-ray pictures in which muscles’ blood vessels and bones have acquired a smooth “wooden” quality. The tree’s grain and rings intertwine with the human body to become a single entity. The brown human silhouette leaves an imprint of a piece of living, moving and breathing reality on the tree, creating an image rooted in a historical layer. The postures of the figures, with their elegance and majesty along with a kind of homage to nature, and the monumentality combined with humility, are evocative of the figures painted on the red and black vessels – the Greek mythological heroes Achilles, Petrocles and Hector, and the gods of Parthenon. We drift between a three-fold happening: the sensation derived from the strong materiality of the tree and the verbal associations it evokes, i.e. the numerous sayings and idioms connected with trees, and between these two and the images and visual quotations from the history of art. Hanan often relates to natural materials in his work, and many of his photographs link together man and tree, man and tree rings, man and wood grain. These elements spring from his kinship with nature and his environment.
The third series also consists of treated color print photographs. We can find here too subtle allusion to the human figure. Unlike the meditative immutability conveyed by the previous series, this one highlights movement, dance movement, possibly even ecstatic dance movement. In the context of the exhibition it takes place in the wood, around trees. Unlike the other two series, featuring two predominant colors, the colors here are bright, reflecting a certain aspect of the contemporary scene of clubs and discos.
The “music” of the series is entirely different from the other two. The cold metal “sounds” characterizing the “strips” and the “classical music” of the “portraits in wood” have been substituted by an exciting “hot noise” calling for great festivities. The music “raves” of nature that constitute an inseparable part of the young musical scene nowadays, seem to reenact ancient Dionysian rites that combined music and dance, blackouts and hallucination. Hanan’s photographs call attention to happenings of the kind, while they themselves express it very subtly.
Hanan has created three different spaces of cognition with a complex interrelationship: a lively and spirited contemporary world inspired by the Greek and Roman festivities – the “dance” series ; a post-modern, cold and frightening yet extraordinarily attractive world that is evocative of sets in a science fiction movie, featuring men with super-human capabilities and strong creatures – the “strips” and other pictures ; and finally the serene, composed and meditative classical world, which is engrossed in thoufht and radiates inner strength – the “portraits in wood” series.
Hanan’s work contains references to contemporary artistic discourse, such as the very fashionable concept of crossbreed and hybrid. He combines the image of a living organism (man), with an inanimate element (wood) and a plant (tree) in the “portraits in wood” series; whereas in the strips he uses elements that have founded alternative worlds made up of pieces and links that have crystallized into a wondrous architectonic structure. Hanan’s unconventional combinations in the treated photographs succeed in arousing an emotional response in the viewer. Exhibiting the three series together has originated a composite between the panoramic dimension presented in the strips and the deconstruction of the human image presented in the other two series, which make Hanan a part of the contemporary art scene.
Ketzia Alon
Exhibition Curator
