Still Life

Maya Hanoch, Solo Exhibition
Omer Tiroche Gallery, Jaffa
14.6.18 – 24.5.18

There is more to the women in Maya Hanoch’s paintings than meets the eye. Rather than looking straight at the viewer, they are shown from the back, some sleeping, their faces often blurred, covered or cropped.

Made of oil on wood, her paintings are mostly based on still photographs. Hanoch collects the photographs from the internet and gives them her own interpretation.

In the world of photography, there is no right exposure. The proper exposure is the one each photographer chooses for their own photograph. Likewise, Hanoch wishes to control the amount of exposure that is right for her, balancing between overexposure and underexposure.

For years Maya Hanoch avoided painting, choosing to work in stage design, to remain behind the scenes, until the desire to paint overcame the fear of exposure.

In her first solo show, By the Way, Hanoch focused on abstract landscapes. In the current exhibition the subject matter seems more personal and revealing – women figures. But the latter’s presence in her works is partial, lacking. The artist plays with presence and absence. Absence is in fact a kind of presence, which can be more powerful than the whole image. At times, the fragmentation reveals more than the complete painting. The partial exposure of the figures in Maya Hanoch’s works seems to suggest that they find it hard to bare their inner world to the viewer.

The way the artist chooses to crop the figures in her paintings, and the format sizes she chooses, determine the viewer’s point of view and the relationships between them and the painting. On the one hand she places the viewer very close to the figure, and on the other, she sets them clear limits and delineates the painting so that it does not show the figure in full. She seems to be saying: This much and no more. I will not reveal further.

This exhibition can be seen as a “selfie” in which the camera is trained on the artist. However, the postures in which she chooses to present the figures in her paintings contradict the essence of the selfie, which is all about seeking attention and boosting the subject’s self-regard. The artist presents a kind of “anti-selfie”. An impossible selfie.

In her book The Beauty Myth, the author Naomi Wolf suggests that beauty is not only an aesthetic category, but also a political one. She describes the imposition of the beauty myth on the feminine conceptual space and its use as a means of social control and as a political weapon against women’s advancement. Women’s cultural representations perpetuate conceptions of gender and serve as a disciplining force. Women are strong, independent, enjoy equal rights and hold positions of power, but the beauty myth obliges them to base their identity on their beauty. The women in the photographs used by Maya Hanoch are frozen in their posture, and the entire image is processed to perfection. Hanoch does not adhere to these photographs, but rather distorts them in some way. In her paintings, the women appear blurred or are shown from unusual angles, as a kind of defiance against the disciplining power of the ideal of feminine beauty, which is reinforced in an age dominated by the aesthetics dictated in social networks.

Still Life can also be read as ‘still, life’. Frozen and processed in the photograph and again in the painting, reduced to being the object of one gaze after another, the women in the paintings refuse this reduction. They still live.

You’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself” Glinda the Good Witch, The Wizard of Oz, Frank L. Baum

Shira Davidi and Dorit Lautman

Curators of the exhibition

Catalogue