Diary — Galerie Derouillon — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 13 → December 20, 2014

Galerie Derouillon is pleased to present Guy Yanai’s first solo exhibition in Paris, and his first exhibition with Galerie Derouillon. Diary, featuring 10 new paintings, created at the Villa Lena Foundation this fall specifically for this occasion. The ten works can be considered Yanai’s most personal and intimate work to date. “Sad things in happy colors” as he has recently stated. Moments of subtle tragedies, rejection, loneliness, and foreign alienation dominate the show.

The French writer Michel Houellebecq says that every cigarette is a mini suicide, for Yanai, every painting can be seen as a mini suicide. Yanai has become in recent years one of the major figures in the Israeli art scene; where mainly installation, performance and video flourish. Yanai maintains a devout studio practice in Tel Aviv, painting daily, and it is precisely this routine that conditions the extraordinary quality that we see in his work. The paint being in applied in horizontal “stripes” that simultaneously convey painting in its purest element, the element of time in a frozen image, a way for the viewer to undo the work, and to deconstruct the color in the works to single strokes of paint. This fastidious working methodology enables the paintings to walk a very tight rope between figuration and abstraction. The feeling is that if one mark of paint is removed, then the painting falls apart; this inherent tension in the work sometimes contradicts the image of the work thus adding more cognitive layers while experiencing the work.

Born 1977 in Haifa, Israel, Guy Yanai currently lives and works in Tel Aviv. He attended Parsons School of Design and the New York Studio School, and received a BFA from Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.Recent solo exhibitions include First Battle Lived Accident at Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv, Battle Therapy Living Room at the Velan Center for Contemporary Art, Turin; Lived & Laughed & Loved & Left at La Montagne Gallery, Boston, and Accident Nothing at Aran Cravey Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibition venues include Aran Cravey Gallery, Joshua Liner Gallery, Charlotte Fogh Gallery, Aarhus, Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv, A.L.I.C.E, Brussels, Sommer Contemporary Tel Aviv, Hangar Bicoca, Milan, Ashdod Museum of Art, Ashdod, Shenkar College, among others. Upcoming projects include a solo show at Ameringer McEnery Yohe, NYC in 2015.

On the occasion of the exhibition Galerie Derouillon have produced a limited edition catalog. The catalog includes an in depth interview by Timothée Chaillou and a critical essay by Barbara Sirieix, as well as other visual material from the process at Villa Lena.