Look for the thread

Look for the thread that connects the canvases, the skin and the textures – and you’ve found the open space of forms and contents of Hagit Shahal. True, in the postmodern era of encasings and external appearances we have already met artists of textures, and more than one woman artist who works with weave and thread, whether like Penelope or like Ariadne. But while the artists of exterior texture of the past decade sought to negate the "essence" and to leave us only in the dilemma of the slender external fiction, in the “clothing", Hagit Shahal - in contrast - dresses up in order to expose herself. And it seems to me that she - as she comes out for the purpose of self-penetration - touches on the essential, on her own essence.
Textiles, ornamentations, patterns of tiles - the “supporting surface", the visual infrastructure from which this painting emerges discloses everything: decorative textures. We, who have grown accustomed lately to feminist provocations in the sphere of the woman who decorates, and decorates herself, may not have recalled the linguistic parallel in Hebrew between “kishut" (decoration) and “kushta”, which means truth and honesty. It is also doubtful whether Hagit Shahal is aware of this lexicology, but there is no doubt that she sets out from decoration in order to arrive at the truth beyond it. Will the carpet engulf the figure on top of it, or will the woman triumph over the background? This is painting as a process of self-knowing.
Her point-of-departure, after all, is not simply any kind of decoration, but floor decorations. Her canvases - carpets, towels, etc. - lie on the ground and her self-portraits are all in a supine position. Might we say, the position of a candidate for being trampled on or run over? Or, better - shall we ignore the supine position as a state of psychoanalytic exposure that reveals the most intimate of all? After all, even the close-ups of the head, which recur in these paintings, promise us spaces for pondering, which are also hinted at in several postures of pondering. And alternately, if not contrastingly, the supine position as the position of the woman as seductress, as an erotic image of a male fantasy. Here we have the dualism.
Is she enjoying herself or suffering there, on the floor? Is she resting? Getting a suntan? Or, is she not in anguish (a bad dream? Pain?), or angry? Or perhaps she is only modeling these psychological states? The various paintings, these self-portraits, do not promise an unequivocal answer. They take care to leave us in ambiguity. On the one hand, the self- beautification, the self-decoration, the selling of the image, like a model who emphasizes the mouth make-up, the painting of the fingernails, the dyeing of the hair (even when she gets a suntan, she is "painting" her skin), the changes of clothes, the correct lighting on parts of the face... and, on the other hand, the great doubt that rests upon this visual theater, a doubt which is suffused with the melancholy that is also present. See how she has reddened her hair as a flattened stain that turns into a stain almost of blood. Is Hagit Shahal modeling on the canvases, or is she courageously exposed in them? Both these together. On the level of her becoming one with the decorative textiles, she too is beautifying, and beautifying herself, and thus hiding and distancing herself from us. On this level, where her painting comes close to modeling and advertising on posters and in “women’s magazines", the painting offers us illusion and fictions. Yet, something stronger in these paintings raises them higher to invite us to a personal and public discussion of the condition of the woman who models, the woman who beautifies herself, the woman as object. So we should not ignore the elegance demonstrated in the contents and forms of the paintings: Hagit Shahal offers us an "elegant painting" (not exactly a value that is in demand, in our avantgarde circles) only in order to rip open a peephole in it to “beyond the elegant”. Did the Italian Renaissance see “beauty" as a supreme value? In 1992 we already identify “feminine beauty” as a manipulation, and this is what is being put on autobiographical trial by the artist, an expert on beauty.
Hence. we will discern here a Pop-Art consciousness, but more than that, we will find before us a very personal and post-performance painting which is concerned with an examination of the relations among image, manipulations, and personal truth.
On the level of the painterly language, Hagit Shahal does not conceal her debts, and especially those to the modernist “painters of women" like Matisse, Klimt and Andy Warhol (of the Interview magazine covers). She, who was already deep into actional abstraction - like that of De Kooning, but more lyrical and slightly figurative - now adopts a polyphony of instruments, from photographic realism (the painting begins from an automatic self - photograph in a supine position) to expressive abstraction. In the photographic realism she is on the route of the Image-projections, while in the expressive abstraction, she is on the route of exposure. Between one and the other, she exerts feminine manipulations upon us. She stage-directs herself in a manner that might, remind us of the self-photographs of Cindy Sherman (also often enough in a supine position), although with less of the melodramatic extremism: here she holds her throat in a blue-violet light (is she in a "blue” erotic state, or in a situation of choking?), and here she is lit up in a warm light, a relaxed woman, and here she is in artificial light (studio-lighting? movie lighting?), a "dreamer"… It seems that most of the chauvinistic images of woman can be found in these paintings - woman as seductive, as vulnerable, as soft, as dissociated… Certainly her exposing of herself in the nude, with the cold and expressionless gaze and the frigid body-color brings her act of giving herself to the "woman as object" to one of its heights. Except that the restrained refusal and the quest for the personally authentic seek to uproot the conventional image, be it male or other. And thus in the visual tension itself, between the textilic two- dimensionality (in the background) and the three-dimensionality of the woman represented, resides the metaphoric tension too: the refusal to flatten the I.
Something has happened in the creative process: the self-cultivation has slackened, the brushwork has become less “graphic" and more nervous, a "wild" activeness has surged onto the surface of the "beauty”, the elegance is in crisis: the face has become elongated suddenly in a kind of unreal meltingness, the limbs have become slightly contorted, the neck and hair have faded in the impatience of the brush, the shading of the parts of the face is more short-tempered, the brush slaps jump to the ornamentation of the carpet, the brush strokes are less elegant, giving less of an accounting of their appearance. Is it by chance that in these works the make-up too has been removed from Hagit’s face? And that her eyes are more red? Is it by chance that the color and the light have gone “dead” and verge on the lighting of a corpse? For some moments it even seems to us that our glamorous model has died and her eyes are made of glass. Has the supine position changed from the slate of Eros to that of Death?
Either way: in the shift from the model-photography-studio to the refrigerating-room of the dead, the woman as a body has shifted from the death-state of inauthenticity to the life-state of the self- knowledge of the metaphoric death.
The end of the process, as of now: the carpet, the Persian carpet alone. The same carpet that starred under the blazing self-portrait in the earlier painting. The body of the model has been removed, and it would be better to say: the artist has been saved. The weavery point-of- departure (that feminine, Middle-Eastrn weavery that serves for decoration of the home, the nest) is also the closing of the circle of the woman-artist who returns to herself with open eyes. Are the pair of flowers of the carpet the eyes that have opened? Is the carpet telling us that the artist has risen to her feet and gone out into the world?

Dr. Gideon Ofrat