Jacob El Hanani at Yoshii - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

If you glanced into Jacob El Hanani's new show you might have thinking you saw a room of small gray monochromes. It's single when you begin to approach El Hanani's drawings that they reveal their veritable character. First, the gray fields slacken up to become mottled patterns and blotchy defences Then, at the range of about a paw (more or less, depending upon your eyesight) his frighteningly meticulous works rise as pen-and-ink drawings composed of tiny motifs repeated thousands of times in an allover pattern. The motifs vary widely: there are dots, circles, cros hatching, skewed grids, plane Hebrew calligraphy. Yet each work is made of of that kind minute, closely packed lines that it is hard to believe it could be the production of human hands. El Hanani's drawings present precise features on a scale we are used to seeing single in natural phenomena such as the skins of lizards or high-tech produces like integrated circuitry.

Given the amount of time each drawing obviously requires (two to three month according to the artist), this exhibit of 21 drawings represented a near-epic achievement. The majority of the works date from the past five years, with individual from 1988 and two from 1978 Born and raised in Morocco, El Hanani studied art in Israel and France before coming to fresh York in the mid-'70s. Surprisingly, this is his first solo display in New York (though he is clearly someone who knows the virtues of patience).

To give an idea of the scale of El Hanani's drawings, consider that a fingerprint-sized area of Maagal contains perhaps 150 tiny circular forms, compacted together like grains of wheat or sand. The whole drawing consists of at a uneven guess, 1,000 of these areas, which means that Maagal is compos of about 150000 separate circles. Examining the drawing closely - actually there is no other way to gaze at it - you can tread on the heels of El Hanani's method. How, for instance, he's used files of circles to divide the drawing into quadrants. Within these quadrants, which are barely perceptible, are still smaller divisions, also formed by means of rows of circles. The artist looks to have accomplished his vast accumulation of shapes in sections, delimiting small areas into which he then packed in as many forms as possible.

There are not many antecedents for this kind of work in the canons of Western art, nor is it a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of related to contemporary masters of endurance like Roman Opalka. More germane are Islamic calligraphy and the Jewish tradition of micrography. single could also think of the obsessive drawing for the use of all among outsider artists like Adolf Wolfli. These affinities highlight the spiritual dimensions of El Hanani's work, dimensions accessible to anyone willing to emulate a portion of the artist's infinite care and patience; anyone prepared, in Blake's phrase, to diocese a world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour.

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