GUY YANAI
“I’ve always tried to listen to my creativity and not run away from it.”

© Image by Elad Sarig

KÖNIG GALERIE: Do you remember your first touchpoint with art and being creative?

Guy Yanai: That was very early in life, even in kindergarten. I remember creating objects and taking them apart again, just being purely creative. There were no “plastic arts” in Haifa, Israel, during my childhood in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My family moved to the US when I was 8 years old, and I remember representing my class at the art show night in the second grade. I drew flowers on a black background. I copied flags and Boston Celtics basketball players. Throughout my life, I’ve always tried to listen to my creativity and not run away from it.

KG: When did you know you wanted to pursue a career of being an artist?

GY: I knew very early that I wanted to create art as a career path, even at 15, I would say. Reading the book “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison was an important experience that impacted my artistic career. The book touched me so much that I stayed up all night and made a painting about the story. I remember exactly what it was: acrylic paint on cardboard, depicting a large face, mainly with yellow, orange, and red, warm colors. After I finished my academic studies, I got a bit lost and wandered around. Only at the age of 30 did I manage to do nothing else but paint. The road leading to that moment was long and bumpy, with me making every mistake possible.

KG: You’re born in Israel and moved to the USA with your family at a young age. Being based between Tel Aviv and Marseille at the moment, how do your uprisings and surroundings inspire your practice?

GY: I always hated the 80s aesthetic, whether in Israel or the USA, but now I love it. So, the aesthetics I grew up with are something deep in my conscience. Generally, I don’t really think too much about whether my surroundings and moving around are instilled in my work, but for sure they are. It’s like being a fish in water. I do work between two places, and sometimes I feel like I work better in one city, but it’s always changing. Obviously, in the past eight months, with what is happening in Israel, it has been easier to work in peace and quiet in Marseille. Agnes Martin once said that her environment had zero effect on her practice. That’s a rather extreme thing to say, I think. For me, both places as well as travels do give my work something; maybe it’s for the viewer to say what it is.

KG: Featuring a distinctive color palette of soft and pastel hues and pixel-like, square brushstrokes, your paintings have a characteristic visual language. How have these elements evolved?

GY: Everything unfolds and evolves slowly, but only through continuous work. The evolution of the paintings is not intellectual. The growth of the actual painting only comes from painting. I think about how ten years ago I saw that a straight brushstroke could be so many things. It can represent nothing, just a line of color; it can represent a book or an object; it can be part of a few vertical or horizontal strokes of different colors that can then represent something. The viewer completes the content, context, and meaning. The works in the exhibition YOUR WORLD NOT MINE feature some new kinds of brushwork. The painting A BLONDE WOMAN (AFTER PALMA VECCHIO) has some very loose and thick curvy paint strokes. Some of the works now are less rigid and a bit less angular. I see some painters and artists who have done the same thing for fifty years, and I really don’t understand how that can be done.

© Image by Annik Wetter

KG: You’ve become widely known for flattened depictions of everyday life – but mostly not your own life. You mentioned that the subjects, landscapes and motifs in your work have no connection to yourself, personally. Why is it important to you to have this distance from your painterly objects? How do you manage to create such closeness?

GY: Sometimes it is my own life. I’ve painted apartments I’ve lived in, hotel rooms I’ve stayed in, and views that I have seen. But yes, most of the work has nothing to do with me. I don’t want anyone to understand what has been “lived” and what has been plasticized. There should be the same passion, conviction, sense of purpose, and love put into things that I’ve never actually experienced. In the first show at KÖNIG GALERIE, called IN THE SHADOW OF YOUNG GIRLS IN FLOWER, I showed two landscapes with houses from a geographic area that I’ve never even come close to. I realize now that these images are so exotic for me. That foreign sense of order resonates and tells me: Paint me! Make me yours!

KG: For the first time now, you painted your wife, Aurore. The work is one of the center pieces of your exhibition YOUR WORLD NOT MINE at KÖNIG GALERIE and radiates extraordinary intimacy. Why did you decide to break this rule of only depicting strangers? And how did it feel to portray your wife for the first time?

GY: A lot of my wife’s friends said that I had to paint Aurore, probably because I was painting so many other women, but I didn’t want to at first. Whenever I have free time and am flying, I always scroll through the pictures on my camera roll. Once, I found this image of Aurore, which is from a picnic we had in the Jerusalem mountains together with my daughter Ava. It was such a beautiful day. I loved this image and that moment, so I tried and went for it. It’s important to remember that there are no rules; it’s simply how things have ended up unconsciously. It’s always good to break those rules, especially in painting. I’ll tell you one thing: There is no way I am able to paint my parents, and there is no way I can paint my children. That simply seems impossible to me. Gerhard Richter painted his family, his wife, and his baby, and it just feels surreal to me how he was able to do that.

Guy Yanai, AURORE, 2024 © Courtesy of the artist

KG: What inspires you about portraying females, generally?

GY: I only started painting people during the COVID pandemic, when deadlines became nonexistent. It seemed like a good time to try new things and take new directions. Back then, I actually started portraying men. Peter Doig, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michel Houellebecq were among the first people that I painted. I then asked Lily Taieb, a young French actress, if I could paint her. She agreed, and I asked her for a picture of her wearing a green T-shirt and her right side shrouded in sunlight. After that painting, I realized that I’m more interested in painting females. Women are much more beautiful than men, more timeless, and more classic, and that resonates with me. I studied the Early Renaissance and Renaissance painting, and I see how that historical epoch has been translated into photography and other imagery, which really excites me. It’s a dialogue about how females have been portrayed for thousands of years. My process of choosing the woman and painting the situation is is very intuitive.

KG: You don’t paint in layers, which means you can’t afford to make any mistakes. If you do, you have to scrape it off, making the process very time-consuming. Devoting that much time to the process, is it more important to you than the completed work?

GY: I don’t think about it that way. It might actually be the case that I paint in less time because I need to be super focused and present during the process. To me, having an exact process is important, but what everybody else is interested in is the finished work. That’s what matters. Pablo Picasso once said, "Don’t show me what you are looking for; show me what you have found," or something like that. I read that at a young age, and it really stuck with me.

KG: The mastery of your work lies in simplicity. When do you know when a painting is finished?

GY: Deadlines tend to really help the process of finishing a work. I usually call the photographer to come to the studio and shoot the paintings when I’m still deep in the process, so I’m forcing myself to work with this deadline. Normally, I still paint until 20 minutes before he comes. For this show, YOUR WORLD NOT MINE, it was easier to finish the paintings. I went back and forth between Marseille and Tel Aviv, which helped me to see the work more clearly and objectively. My wife always wants me to finish earlier than I do, but I like sticking to my own routine. I know when to stop, when to continue, and when it’s time to declare a painting finished. It’s a bit like alchemy; it's really hard to pin down.

© Image by Elad Sarig

KG: Your current exhibition at KÖNIG GALERIE is called YOUR WORLD NOT MINE, of which you said that it “affirms once again the power of painting (both the noun and the verb) to transform our relation to life.” Can you tell us more about the concept and how the show came together?

GY: The show came together by simply painting. The space of the gallery frightened me, like I lost sleep over the space. I didn’t want to “fill” it with paintings, and I also didn’t want to do a massively large-scale work. I was looking at the gallery’s model every day for months. Johann König told me not to worry and that whatever happens, it will be great, and it can be a totally “empty” show. So, I just started creating. My first two ideas were either to work on paintings depicting the production and making of films or the life of the war in Israel, but I threw both ideas aside. I cared less about the concept of the show and more about putting as much love as I could into making the most beautiful work that I was able to. And that’s what I did. The first three works I knew needed to be in the exhibition were: OFFICE, OUTSIDE, and REINETTE AND ERIC, PARIS. These three works are all the same height and work together thematically: one being an interior, one an exterior, and one being an exterior with figures in a city environment. Those three works also took me the longest. The last two works I put in the exhibition were the lake painting, FOUR PEOPLE IN FRONT OF THE LAKE, and the WINDOW-painting. I created them rather late, but they also came together quicker. I believe nothing can replace painting. All this talk about AI will make painting even more special, just like photography did about 150 years ago.

© Image by Annik Wetter

KG: Oftentimes, the titles of your exhibitions and work refer to literature. This show’s title, YOUR WORLD NOT MINE, originates from a text message of your wife. What is the story behind this?

GY: It’s becoming harder to read with the iPhone addiction everyone has, and I truly mean everyone. The best ideas have always come from reading. I buy a lot of books, but, generally, in the past two years I have just been re-reading all of Houellbecq, Marcel Proust, and books about Proust. But yes, literature, films, and art make up about 80% of what’s behind my work. YOUR WORLD NOT MINE describes a moment in Aurore’s and my relationship. Aurore is French, and I’m not. She has her roots there, while in my family there has been so much movement, so much persecution, and so many languages in the past three generations. I love that feeling of walking in towns, where you can feel that people have lived there for generations and generations, and there is this cognitive stability. I don’t have that. During the past few years, with COVID and the war happening, it has felt like the world is against my relationship with Aurore. When I texted that to her, she replied, “Your world, not mine.” What a perfect answer. Then I reversed it. Yes, YOUR world not mine. All of what I do is not really my world; it’s a sort of fascination, jealousy, and wanting to belong to this dialogue and history of art. It’s not mine, but I’m trying to make it mine.

Installation view of the exhibition YOUR WORLD NOT MINE by Guy Yanai at KÖNIG GALERIE © Image by Roman März

KG: REINETTE AND ERIC, PARIS is one of the central works in the show, depicting director Eric Rohmer and actress Joelle Miquel during the filming of "Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle" (1987) in Paris. Rohmer and this movie have influenced dozens of your paintings over the years. Can you explain the inspiration and influence Rohmer has on you?

GY: When I was younger, I enjoyed the aura of Eric Rohmer, but I hadn’t actually watched any of his films. When I started watching them, they seemed so dull and boring, but somehow I couldn’t get them out of my head. It almost annoyed me; not much happened in these movies, mainly just dialogue, no sex, only a few locations. Gene Hackman said that watching a Rohmer film was like watching paint dry. But I kept on watching more and more Rohmer movies, and the imagery stuck with me. They are so banal, so basic, but so perfectly considered. I was drawn to the images in an almost hypnotic way, so I just started to make them mine. Rohmer’s work is the antithesis of today. He was beyond humble; it was said that his wife didn’t even know when he was making films, and his mother never knew that he was a director. His life was frugal; he hated taxis, and the films cost almost nothing to make. Something about all of this excites and touches me.

KG: How do you like the audience of the exhibition to perceive your work?

GY: I hope the audience has an emotional reaction. Of course, there are a lot of references to movies, stories, books, and other shows of mine. But primarily, I want the viewer to feel something. If it interests them enough, there are many layers to discover. But in the first few seconds of seeing the show, I would hope that the viewer is moved.