Horror vacui, esthetic kenophobia, obsessive, minute detail, exclusion of color: these are a few of the traits we have come to think of as Jacob El Hanani’s stock-in-trade. His career consists in a deployment of a very limited suite of resources, akin to Samuel Beckett’s single-adjective description of Bram van Velde’s paintings: “inexpressive.” Beckett did not mean they were devoid of expression. He was simply stating the fact that in art there can be nothing to express that would not be merely anecdotal: random thoughts, feelings, personal problems. T.S. Eliot summed up this attitude up in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919):
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
Beckett and Eliot explain what it is to be an artist—not the search for a vehicle to reveal an ego to the universe, but to seek a vehicle in which the ego is merely a passenger sharing space with an entire tradition. Eliot’s elegant paradox, that only those with character and passions can understand what the renunciation of those things entails, comes to the point.
Beckett and Eliot could have been talking about Jacob El Hanani. He does not hide his indebtedness to tradition—to Turner in the past, to Paul Cézanne and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva—in this show of twenty-one ink on gessoed canvas drawings made between 2020 and 2024. If we evoke Cézanne’s many representations of Mont Sainte-Victoire, El Hanani-related thoughts materialize, especially Cézanne’s metamorphosis of a real space into an artistic subject by means of the stylization and simplification of natural forms. Translated into El Hanani’s idiom, Cézanne’s landscape becomes, in Linescape (From the Paul Cézanne Series) (2024), masses of short vertical lines whose density varies, creating a horizon line, a foreground, and a background sky. Figuration and abstraction lose their integrity here because neither term is applicable to El Hanani’s version. Both, nevertheless, are present, linking the drawing to a historical continuity.
Inspired by Cézanne, Vieira da Silva moved his landscapes into the field of gestural expressionism. El Hanani’s Linescape From the Maria Helena Vieira Da Silva Series (2023–24) moves its source away from gesture into geometry. The term “linescape” is itself an El Hanani pun on “landscape,” while simultaneously alluding to its being composed of short lines arranged at an angle (to the left) and massed in such a way as to constitute a parodic version of landscape. But let’s be clear: this parody is not a form of ridicule, but El Hanani’s way of, once again, reading and translating Vieira da Silva. Her painterly passion is controlled by El Hanani’s reasoned structuring.
Fans of El Hanani should not think he has abandoned the specific references to his Jewish and Middle Eastern culture he so often makes, even if none of these works contain the minute Hebrew writing that appeared in many earlier works. Two drawings evoke the Hamsa, the apotropaic hand that appears in both Islamic and Judaic tradition. (The hand, sometimes with an eye embedded in the palm, wards off the evil eye.) El Hanani includes the number five in both of his drawings from the Hamsa series—appropriately, since the Semitic root of Hamsa is five. Five Lines (From the Hamsa Series) (2021–23), is a dense work composed of small blocks composed of short ink strokes. This would seem to represent the spirit of the original Hamsa, a protective device, a shield against evil shared by unfortunately antagonistic cultures. Group of Five (From the Hamsa Series) (2022–23) groups its masses of blocks composed of five short strokes in the upper and lower registers of the canvas. The center is light, leaving us to wonder if we are looking at a successful warding off of the evil eye or, to the contrary, a broken structure through which evil finds entry.
Independent of either artistic or cultural allusions, Currents (2023) is all about movement—a flow, perhaps—because of its sweeping rhythms, the most musical of El Hanani’s drawings. A magnificent composition, unique in this show because of its fluidity, the piece seems to take us back to the personality and emotions Eliot says the artist must escape to be an artist. Call it nostalgia or revived memory; the work captures ephemeral passions and transmutes them into the eternity of art.
