Still-Life Fleeting: Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem
Curator: Nimrod Bar-Am

  (‘Still-life’-fleeting (or “passing –away” 

A middle-aged man studies a faded photograph. In it, a girl smiles coyly. She seems to be smiling and looking at him, because years ago her eyes searched beyond the lens for the eye of the person that took her picture. She has been doing so for the past seventy years: watching and smiling at every person whose gaze fell on the faded surface. Neither she nor the man who took the picture is alive. It seems if we wait a little, we might hear her bursting in laughter. 

 

As prosaic and mundane as this moment may seem to us, it is both magical and bizarre. For the middle-aged man now studying the picture is the little girl’s son. Yet at the moment the picture was taken, he was but a dim and unlikely possibility in the grand and constantly-whirling scheme of things. There and then, the girl was not even aware of the existence of her future husband, his father. From the safety of the present, the man watching all this realizes that the camera is the closest that we can ever get to a fierce and brutal time-machine: by freezing time it breaks it (and our hearts) into myriad mirror-like shimmering pieces, all reflecting each other. 

 

In the past seven years the Artis Ariel Yannay has lost his parents. His father, the navy admiral Samek Yannay, sailed first into the gray and silent horizon. Then the longings of his loving wife, Bat-Ami, have caught-up with him, and she joined him on their endless voyage. Composed and elegantly reserved, as always, the artist has found himself studying the same old family photos with an ever-changing crowd of consoling mourners and close friends, reconstructing anecdotes and timelines, constantly fact-checking with his older brothers, inquiring about the exact details of this or that image or scene of ‘a present that passed’. Mourning consolers come and go. Only the albums of images stay. And compassion, so it seems, is constantly being projected from them, from the absurd reality of the freezed, yet constantly fading, image itself. It is this constant fading-away which is so compassionate: for only from this technological imperfection can we infer at all that the image is “old”, that time has passed, and that freezing it was a terrible and tragic hubris. 

 

Art critics have been over-occupied with the so called “message” of art works. The themes or messages of art have always been eternal, and few: death, love, and the sober and hopeless hope to grasp that which is constantly passing away, fleeting and fading. Our stance towards (sometimes our dance with) the duality of all things: that they are simultaneously permanent and transitory, substantive and ephemeral. 

 

“The image that you take is always one second older, than the image that you wanted to take”, says the artist. An inherent part of the message of every photograph, then, is that duality, the constant slipping away of the so called “subject”. It is this duality that gazes at us, from every portrait, every landscape study, every still-life. The role of the artist, then, is not so much that of capturing the so called “decisive moment”: for all moments are equally decisive. And it is not so much that of “selecting” the “right” subject or image. It is, rather bringing the viewer nearer to the realization of that constant duality, of whatever image he happens to be capturing. The technique of the artist allows him to extract that theme from all subjects.  

 

The images chosen for this exhibition, as a collection of shapes or themes, share very little in common. Their lack of thematic unity may therefore confuse spectators at a first glance. For they include classic and disciplined “studies of views from a window”, landscapes that may strike one at first as too accidental to be deliberated, and marvelous group portraits from a family picnic (one of them-- a superimposition of two images-- is the result of the camera’s malfunction, and another, so magically orchestrated that it seems to have been meticulously choreographed, although it was not). Yet the theme that is shared by all of the images presented here is that let-go compassion that the artist so cleverly succeeded in extracting from his subjects.

Nimrod Bar-Am