The Lovers | Chelouche Gallery
“… a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order. Hence, a very small animal organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment. Nor, again, can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the spectator.”
*Aristotle, Poetics, Part VII
The painting ”The Rising of the Sun” by François Boucher depicts the world’s awakening at dawn. White horses, nymphs, cherubs, and gods rest upon the clouds and emerge from within them, surrounded by golden light across the sky, in a soft and frothy range of tones. The cosmic order is rendered in the painting as refined and harmonious, a vision of divine beauty, perfected. Dana Yoeli selects colors from the painting and portrays them in close-up. She reaches the painting’s depths like a human using a telescope to probe the mythological firmament, recording the movements of clouds, waves, and cosmic murmuring.
Yet these close-ups are excessively close. It is impossible to strike the proper distance, to apprehend the abundance of details that bring a painting to completion. In close-up, context is lost. It undermines the harmony, the perfect balance of near and remote that Aristotle considered essential for beauty. The act of focusing produces an unsettling over-intimacy with celestial bodies that, in everlasting irony, remain light-years apart. However, it is precisely this flawed close-up that leads to a reconciling, poetic, and a little unnerving realization of the limits of perception. It is a meditation on proportions – the endeavor to establish them, the inevitable failure along the way to them, and their ultimate loss.
To these celestial paintings, the artist has added, akin to a signature, a moon, painted according to its visible phase as seen by the human eye, determined by the lunar calendar on the day the painting was completed. This sudden appearance of the moon evokes a disorienting sense of time: is this early morning or twilight? Are we at sunrise or sunset? The blurred temporality reflects a deeper confusion in the perception of the beautiful and the good: what can human beings, here and now, actually see, and what is hidden from them? What knowledge can we draw from our gaze directed upward in search of a message, despairing of what is taking place on the ground? Will things get better here, or become only unimaginably worse? The cosmic and the human gaze intersect — a crossing of perspectives between gods and mortals, between those who know everything and those who, in this moment, know nothing at all.
Text: Dr. Nana Ariel
*Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Yoav Rinon, Magnes Press, 2003. [in Hebrew].