Haim Shiff Award

A Gaze from Within — The Light that Replaces the Halo Engaging with mystical realism, Ben Cnaan’s paintings attest to an obvious effort to depict reality in its entirety, while simultaneously transcending it. One of the artistic motifs he frequently uses to generate    this effect is that of light: the blazing light  that  gleams,  emerges, penetrates, and is reflected in the various  scenes  in  his  works.  “They were astonished by the light in the painting,” he notes in discussing the response of the prize jury at the National Portrait Gallery in London, which awarded his work Annabelle and Guy (2014) First Prize in the museum’s portrait competition. “They didn’t know it was an Israeli artwork and were sure it came from the Midwest, Italy, or Spain. They said: ‘We didn’t think of Israel, and felt there was something behind the painting, that something was happening there, and it gripped us all.”

​

Indeed, one cannot ignore the light and its dramatic, heavenly, glorious appearance in Ben Cnaan’s works. The presence of the light, which acquires a local quality, is not always contrasted with a dark and dimly lit background, except for the shadows cast by the objects that it illuminates. This unique light manifests itself in various settings. In some cases, it is not the light of warm summer days, which fills the entire  space; it more closely resembles the light of gray, rainy winter days, which appears briefly as rays of sunshine bursting through a crack in a dark mass of clouds. These rays create gleaming spots of light on the ground and on the various objects placed upon it, accompanied sometimes by a rainbow. These translucent spots are enhanced by the shades of gray that circumscribe and surround them.

​

Yossi Yonah, from the catalogue: Matan Ben Cnaan Paintings, 2018.  Editor: Emanuela Calò