First We Feel Then We Fall

Guy Yanai’s first book First We Feel Then We Fall, mixes photography, drawing and painting in the elaboration of a unique visual language. The book opens with a trove of found images that have informed and inspired Yanai’s practice. The “Sources” are followed by drawings and curatorial essays by Nurit Banai and James Trainor. It is clear to see that his paintings hold a “democratic” tribute to a cross-section of filiations, including photographic, print media and film sources, art historical precedents, and the artist’s idiosyncratic memories and chain of associations. Flipping through the book, it is impossible to ignore the relationship between the artist’s various influences, and the mutations they undergo as they find their way into his work. His decision to compile and “curate” an inventory of this source material and expose it as a fundamental element in his artistic process is not without significance. What we can glean from this decision is that photography, painting, television, print media and personal memory are all imagined as sites—or archives—that momentarily stabilize and organize the constant data flow of life as a form of representation. These media function as egalitarian apparatuses that give shape to the content of a communal imagination but cannot arrest or transform its frictions and differences into a conclusive composition.