SHIMRIT YARIV | FACES

SHIMRIT YARIV | FACES

Text by By Irit Carmon Popper

Shimrit Yariv uses fashion and art magazines as the starting point for her paintings. Portraits of beautiful young women, symbols of their desirable, seductive gaze, as well as portraits of old men with a thoughtful, messianic gaze – a paraphrase on the prophet figure. The portrait traces its roots back to the Roman bust that developed into depicting the upper body during the Renaissance and is familiar to this day. They share detailed realism, individualism, and a powerful presence. Placed side by side, these post-modern icons to the adoration of beauty, on the one hand, and of thought and wisdom, on the other, attempt to disrupt the familiar opposites, to blur the classic stigmas that differentiate between contempt and purity, between the physical and the metaphysical.

The women depicted are taken from the visual language of icons and objects. The focus on a countenance of sexual ecstasy while simultaneously erasing the image with brushstrokes negates this construction. The female figure is not passive but is shown in an active state. Women artists often present the female body, linked throughout Christian patriarchal history to sin and shame, as a correction, with the goal of re-appropriating it and presenting it as they experience it. The ecstatic gaze, which is not necessarily pornographic and the thoughtful philosophical gaze, stares into the distance, not meeting another or itself; an attempt to force upon the spectator a new observation that breaks embedded visual codes. The self-aware female portrait, which dares to return the gaze, stands out compared to the ashamed and embarrassed male gaze, which presents itself under a philosophical pretext of doubtful justification.

The paintings relate to the American artist Cindy Sherman’s work (b. 1954), who photographs herself in a range of archetypal female roles taken from sources including magazines, cinema, television, and art. In this way, Sherman criticizes the social roles played by women throughout history.
The discussion circles around how the male gaze fashions a woman’s concept of herself.
The gap between the knowledge that Sherman is the model for all these figures and their lack of identification as self-portraits allows for gender critique.
Yariv also reveals the sources of the portraits as fetishes of beauty and desire, thus permitting the critical comment and negating the thought of voyeurism. In both cases, the images challenge the common autobiographical model of female self-portraits.

The exhibition’s title relates to the plural of “face” and the term for being placed in front of something. This definition demands to refine and focuses on the reflected image.
The double meaning exists in the Hebrew translation of the word “Panim,” which when read in its singular can mean “interior,” for the human face, the external mask, is accepted in parallel to the existence of an internality. The paintings do not depict a specific figure, despite the ability of identification within them, but rather act as the essence of a portrait, as a symbol or icon.
Despite the mimetic duplication, each portrait has the similarity of a self-portrait.
Through the figure of the other, the artist signifies the figure of the self and reduces the gap between object and subject. It is also worth considering the Lacanian “mirror stage,” which formulates the development of the subject as a dialectic process opposite the figure of the other that is first revealed to a baby when looking in a mirror. The artist deals with the claim that the subjective sense of self is constructed from the identification with figures; reflected in the mirror and distances herself from the authentic self, when the painted faces are not, in fact, her face, but have become the faces of others in which her unique figure is reflected.
Yariv erases and “dirties” the analytic figurative image with expressive brushstrokes and bold paint drips, reminiscent of the violent gestures of the abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning (1904-1997).

The interpretation of the gestures moves on a scale between concealment and camouflage to pollution and violent injury. In both cases – iconoclasm. The white paint can be read in this double meaning – it acts as a signifier of light. It has connotation of masks, especially ancient Egyptian death masks; the allusion to death is linked to the occupation with memory via bringing the forgotten back the blurring of the recognized figure. Yariv calls them “memory portraits” through an iconic and archaeological context. In this case, death has a dual appearance – the destruction of the physical existence and the acquisition of the transcendental essence. Is she occupied with mourning youthful beauty and desire melted by time? Or is charm deceitful and beauty vain?

Irit Carmon Popper
Faces | Portraits by Shimrit Yariv.

SHIMRIT YARIV | FACES

My art explores the duality of construction and destruction, memory and oblivion. I create a representational image that is gradually “ruined” – covered by a chaotic image through “accidental” gestures. Throughout the work process, I rebuild and destroy and so forth, emphasizing the conflict between the presence of a mimetic image and the course of coincidence that takes charge. This gesture is equivalent to a natural erosion process over time.
My preferable subject matter is the portraits of women. They may fit into the modern definition of beauty and sex appeal. They also resemble classic portraits and ancient icons but are inspired by fashion models, which are today’s cultural icons and sexual objects. This way, I create a kind of fetish that fulfills a role such as a religious icon.
The figures are imaginary, not of existing people. These are attempts to capture the essence of portraits rather than the image of a specific person, and therefore I relate to them as memories of portraits. They might evoke the memory of ancient art and culture, not only because they resemble ancient icons but mainly because their image is destroyed and “forgotten” through the process of creation and wreckage.
Yet they seem very contemporary.
Naturally, the imagery of icons and memory are mostly related to death. In my paintings, death appears in its duality: the termination of physical existence with the aspiration for transcendental essence. Another aspect of death is revealed by the grief over fading beauty and youth.

Read the full article in Art Market Magazine Issue #67 February 2022