In the Sun’s Shadow | Yana Rotner

Past

Nov 30

November 17th - December 23rd, 2022

Alon Segev Gallery is pleased to present Yana Rotner’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, showing a new body of work, including a series of portrait photographs and color photograms.

In Italian, a portrait is called “Ritratto”, also meaning withdrawal. Yana Rotner’s portraits take this step back, retreating to an ineffable and discreet soft darkness, from which the faces seem to emerge as if from a cinema silk screen.

Rotner filmed most of the portraits at her Tel-Aviv studio, portraits of figures from the art world, among them, a poet, a dancer, a photographer. Rotner’s work method consists of filming brief sequences using a 16mm Bolex film camera. She then develops a selection of photographs cut out from the film and prints them on paper. In this process, the reductive photographic moment, which captures an image, can be circumvented, and a continuous sequence of images reflecting the passage of time can be recorded. This allows the artist to be in the flow of time and only later to select the image best rendering the fraction of a moment that may not have been captured by memory.

The photogram* works comprise two series: Red photograms (2022) after Georgia O’Keeffe’s photograph Forbidden Canyon (1964), and Green photograms created in 2019. The process of creating the photograms consists of using transparent fabrics and paper cuts made by the artist. Then, in a completely dark dark-room**, Rotner creates a composition from these elements and exposes it on light sensitive paper. Finally, she prints them using a special color processor.

" I came to the entrance of a great cavern, in front of which I stood some time, astonished and unaware of such a thing. Bending my back into an arch, I rested my tired hand on my knee and held my right hand over my downcast and contracted eyebrows: often bending first one way and then the other, to see wether I could discover anything inside, and this being forbidden by the deep darkness within, and after having remained there some time, two contrary emotions arise in me, fear and desire - fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see. “ ***

Darkness is the source from which Rotner’s both forms of work, photographs, and photograms, emerge. Rotner prints black ink on paper to frame the faces in her portraits, and works in the depths of the dark-room to create light sensitive photograms, following the old masters of photography's method in which, by starting in darkness, they slowly allowed light in to reveal the image.

* photo-gram = casting of light and shadow on photography paper. In Ancient Greek, phos is light and gramma is writing.
** Due to the fact that color photographic paper is highly sensitive, the development of a color photogram takes place in a completely obscure dark-room as opposed to black and white photographic paper where the development takes place in a dark-room only eliminated by a red light bulb.
*** Jean Paul Richter, ed. The literary works of Leonardo da Vinci, 2 vols, London: Phaeton, 1970, 2:324.