Yanai Segal: Forgotten Harvest
Curator: Irit Hemmo
Text: Yakir Segev
Maya Gallery, January 9, 2025 - February 8, 2025

The Torah mentions five gifts for the poor, but only three of them are directly related to the field: Leket, Peah, and Shikheha [1]. Leket – merely a pair of fallen stalks, Peah – the part of the field intentionally left uncut, and Shikheha – the most generous gift – an entire sheaf of stalks forgotten and not harvested. All of these are expropriated from the owner of the field and transferred to the local poor.

Yanai Segal's works are also a product of persistent wandering, both mental and physical, after the leket, peah, and shikheha – remnants of beauty that have been forgotten or not processed within the "field." This is, of course, the field of art, particularly modernist-abstract art from the early 20th century, embalmed in museums worldwide as a relic of a utopian and pioneering era that has now collapsed. But it is also a real field – industrial areas, workshops of welders and framers, or even nature, from which Segal takes his raw materials.

Indeed, more than objects for viewing, some of Segal's works in the exhibition – which is a collection from different periods in his oeuvre – become forbidden objects to touch. Although the eye translates the inherent tactility back to us as a bodily experience, the desire to glide, touch, and feel their surfaces with our hands – as a possibility for ownership and the discovery of their secret – remains persistent and unsatisfied. It is evident in the works in the exhibition that their commonality lies in the actions Segal performs on and into the surfaces, as a code that rolls from work to work, testing its own feasibility.

Segal, born in Amsterdam (1977), grew up in Jerusalem and studied in the Art Department at Bezalel (2004). He was previously one of the founders of "Barbur" – a pioneer among cooperative galleries in Israel – and even then created works characterized by a constant friction between the "what" (the image) and the "how" (the material). Such were, for example, the geometric, archetypal-folkloric paintings of flowers and vases, painted on spray plaster, in a conscious attempt to sabotage their innocent beauty through clumsy, rough, almost industrial surfaces.

Even in the body of works in the current exhibition, the surfaces of most of the different works are charged with the tension between the marks on them, which create an imaginary or abstract reality, and the materials Segal chooses to work with. Thus, the miniature camel, the mythological and ultimate image of the East, is transformed from an orientalist and naturalistic 19th-century handicraft souvenir into a duplicated and alienated unit, schematically produced and designed with a low industrial finish. In the work 'Untitled', one of the earlier abstract works, Segal creates his own surface over the prepared canvas, seeking to replace the traditional ground with an intentionally flawed texture – a layering of papers roughly attached to the canvas and unified with industrial silver paint. But Segal leaves the new painting surface he created unprocessed, and the marks and images ultimately do not materialize on them. The scarred and distressed surfaces (the English expression "distressed," which describes uneven and non-smooth surfaces, perfectly describes their plight) are the work itself, and they are, in fact, the true marks carried by the canvas.

In some of the works ('Summer, Israeli Landscape' and 'Sorting'), abstract geometric shapes appear, following the aesthetic of pure geometric Purist painting, a forgotten side-stream that branched off from Cubism in the early 20th century. These are shapes that hint at a possible world – still life, sun, mountain, up and down – but with an insistence on a horizontal division that precisely does not lead to illusionism in painting. These are works that insist on turning their backs on objects of gaze like landscape or still life, with the intention of clinging to flatness, with the intention of manifesting as a painting that seeks to remain a painting. In fact, their concern is the realization of forms within surfaces undergoing processes of decay and distress that the artist fabricated. This is a move that accelerates the time of modernist abstracts that claimed to be timeless (as presented in the philosophy of Piet Mondrian) or even embody the end of painting (as in the works of Kazimir Malevich), to accept the authority of all-consuming time. Destructive visual elements that Segal intentionally produces – cracks, cuts, and peelings – penetrate the surfaces of their pure and balanced compositions, exposing pretentious modernism as a distant history that has been abandoned and neglected.

The work 'Sanhedria' best represents the contrasting connections of surfaces that move between the industrial and the poetic, with an ironic embrace of the mythical past of abstract art. It too is a product of wandering through different fields – a common metal window – which the artist recycled and transformed into a heavy barricade built as a diagonal grid of warp and weft. This work also remotely alludes to 20th-century abstract-geometric art and architecture, but at the same time, it is also a purely functional product, the exact opposite of art. In a complex interplay of high art and low materials, Segal added color arrangements to the white metal fence, as in an abstract painting. But these, upon closer inspection, turn out to be tears of colorful plastic bags – a kind of abstract musical modernism, composed of remnants of industrial waste – which only the artistic act is capable of uniting into a new beauty.

[1] Leviticus 19:9-10; Leviticus 23:22; Deuteronomy 24:19-22