solo exhibition

The autobiographical dimension intensifies with Greenwald’s choice to dive deep into a photograph from the family album. A series of small paintings and one large one are based on a moment in a dimly lit room where a small girl sits on a chair, her feet appearing to be in the air, her ankles crossed. In the large painting, a small painting of the same event is attached – an act of duplication / Is it hiding something like a bandage? The collage creates an illusion of depth. Tries to complete what’s missing. Creates distance like perspective in a backward glance at a photo in the album that produces a captured memory and an overview of/toward the past. Like in a car’s side mirror that combines movement and stillness, measuring the distance of the landscape from which one is moving away or leaving, creating an effect of motion frozen in time. The painting is based on a photo from the family album and serves as a basis for exploring the painting medium and the central role of lighting on the color palette. But the research has another layer – the little girl in the picture is based on Greenwald’s mother-in-law’s figure through which she sees herself. Through photography, the painter can momentarily cast herself as a child in the dim room and also connect herself to another seated figure, her feet consciously displayed, representing the hidden world of dancers, a world the painter shares. This repetition of body language between the different figures in the paintings illuminates not only movement and inheritances the painter received from various figures that compose her like us, like ghosts at all times.

Rather, it defines a range between two poles – between the natural, to which the child is closer, and the civilized, represented in the painting of the locked feet. Through the photo album and exhibition structure, a psychoanalytic reading emerges as in Ingmar Bergman’s films, where domestic space restrains and culturally organizes its actors’ desires and provides a basis for deep psychological reading of repressions and dreams. The animal paintings intensify representations of the subconscious and hint at the hidden nature of the characters, the dynamics between them, and the tension between the submissive and the wild. How does one tame and thus harness these forces of nature out of envy and inspiration, how do crocodiles become mountain goats? The weight of the floating ballerinas defying gravity, trying to cancel all imprinting and touch perfection through bodily discipline, versus the crocodile lying perfect in its very nature as a crocodile, capable of leaping without warning against gravity and devouring a light-footed, distracted deer. Is the crocodile the choreographer of the event? Is it what makes the dancing mountain goats overcome gravity? And perhaps on the other side of the coin lies catharsis and complete submission to fate which appears in the form of a crocodile – simply to be devoured instead of turning it into a boot or purse. A central place for the locked feet which mark in this exhibition a boundary between the human and the bestial.

How does one enter the paintings of the dancer-painter? Perhaps through the anonymous painted shoes in which lies hidden the intimate secret and personality of every dancer in the shape of her foot, and perhaps even the painter’s desire for her foot to fit the painted shoe. This refers to the Russian classical ballet teacher, Agrippina Vaganova 1879-1951 from Russia (“Of course…” adds Yael, for this is the code language of those immersed and sharing in these worlds). Another figure in the exhibition is choreographer Leonid Yakobson 1904-1975 who appears in several works. The choreographer in his twisted movements moves between worlds like a magician. The dancers go out of their skin to satisfy the choreographer’s wishes and the medium’s demands. The painted pattern, golden and twisted like his fingers, is borrowed from a painting where a European railing decorates the side of the painting. Vaganova’s face and Leonid’s hands appear in the image on the exhibition invitation, intertwined they create Yael’s face.

The language of painting and the language of dance meet where spoken language – the language of words – retreats, where spoken language is less central. With the shifting of spoken language aside in favor of human body language, its filtering layers peel away revealing the additional primary sensual bestial faces of the forces inherent in the body, which is our body. These enable bridging and exposure of what is similar and different in us, other senses awaken to feel, communicate, bridge. The railing that appears in the paintings as a mirror that detaches from its original function as a sign of boundary and protection when it becomes an ornament in the choreographer’s shirt shows how thin, fragile and transparent the boundary is between the two worlds. The painter-dancer-teacher-choreographer with connections to read and see beyond body language can also guide and lead us beyond the boundaries familiar to us or in which we are placed. Her gaze is that of a master in body insight and its expressions, inviting us to see the human as posture, as reduction for the purpose of expansion.

Accompaniment by Hagit Unanmi Rubinstein