Guy Yanai successor of Paul Cézanne

Abstract

A philosophical hermeneutic of the work of the contemporary Israeli visual artist Guy Yanai is carried out. In this way, the aim is to elucidate his pictorial style, which in principle appears to be linked to conventional figurationism. To this end, the following hypothesis is formulated, based on Heidegger’s hermeneutics: “Guy Yanai’s figurative work presents him, as ‘being there’, through a visible displacement of everyday life, in order to understand art as its most peculiar ‘being able to be itself’”. The method used is the single-case method, by means of a sample selection based on theoretical sampling and the paradigmatic case method. The main findings indicate, first, that Yanai’s style can be perfectly interpreted as that of a pixelated figurationism, and, second, that Yanai reveals himself as the Heideggerian “being there” that displaces or discards everydayness in order to take charge of his project of achieving his own most peculiar “power to be itself”. Among the five metaphors proposed, the main one is that of “Guy Yanai successor of Paul Cézanne”.