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Spirits of Our World
By Robert Ayers
Who are these skinny girls who appear in Yigal Ozeri's newest paintings? They are the daughters and
younger sisters of the women to whom he has returned in his work like a lovesick suitor for more than
ten years now.
The course of true love has not run smooth for Yigal Ozeri and the women he has painted: when he first started to
evoke female presences it was through their clothes, through their accoutrements, through the things that they
were not; and after those first guilty flirtations, he deliberately hid them from view. They have wandered
disconcertingly through different historical and art historical periods - in their first appearances they were
drawn from of the canvases of Zurbaran and Velasquez, elsewhere they seem to have been imagined by a pre-Raphaelite,
by a softcore pornographer, or by a present-day portraitist, but now - particularly when they're caught in their schoolgirls'
underpants - they appear to have stepped directly out of a contemporary snapshot. He paints them naked, or in the slightest of
undergarments, and his attention has shifted from mere appearances to skin and bone reality. It is as though after
twelve years Yigal Ozeri finally recognizes who they are.
Of course, throughout this entire love affair, their real home has been within Ozeri's art, and it is striking how - just as his painting technique has grown more sophisticated - his vision has simplified and focused. Whereas in their earlier appearances these women inhabited pictures full of knowing self-reference and conceptual complexity - which were typical of Ozeri's canvases up until that point - they now occupy what are apparently the simplest paintings he has ever made.
For some time the unnerving accuracy of Ozeri's representations has led to his art being termed hyperrealist, but that word is actually painfully inadequate for pictures so charged with a human presence. Far from the mere visual record and the flat, technically perfect surface of hyperrealist pictures, these are works in which, as Ozeri himself has put it, we can "feel the breath" of these girls on our skin. The sensation is at once thrilling and unsettling.
These girls are not interlopers in their landscape settings, nor even elements of it (like Priscilla whom Ozeri said he wanted to paint "like a tree") but rather embodiments of its spirit, and that is why their vulnerability is so disconcerting.
Though it has taken Ozeri more than a decade to come to know them, that does not mean that their identities are straightforward. Neither quite women nor girls, they are sexually mature, but their tiny breasts protrude little more than their elbows, hips or shoulder blades, and their faces have the strange disproportion of the immature teenager. Whether they smile, play, or dance together in a late summer meadow, or lie legs splayed amid sticks on the edge of a lake their fragility is something close to heartbreaking.
They occupy fantasies of nature that are conjured in the harsh urban borough of Queens, and they are also related - perhaps rather surprisingly - to the very different paintings that Ozeri made in 2004 when he looked directly out of his studio window, and his subjects were not women or even human beings, but rather the sad bedraggled pigeons on the wrecked windowsills. Just like those birds, the embodiments of the world that they inhabit, these new girl-women are the spirits of ours, the world in which they live and breathe so convincingly. In the end their vulnerability is that of our planet, and that is why the simplicity of their presentation and the palpability of their presence make these the most important pictures that Yigal Ozeri has ever made.
Robert Ayers is a British-born, Manhattan-based artist and writer and is a regular contributor to ARTnews and ARTINFO.com. He is also New York correspondent to Total Theatre (London) and EIKON (Vienna).
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