An unsettling emptiness runs through Guy Yanai’s works, as interior spaces, views of the street and occasional crops of external scenes as seen from indoors are presented largely without human life, and with a sparse use of objects. This work suggests human activity, as the door and window depicted within it sit ajar, but the lack of a person within the space allows the viewer’s mind to wander. Have they had to leave in a hurry? “Guy Yanai strips his subjects down to geometric necessity and builds them back up again in oil paint,” says Miles McEnery New York, which is opening a show of the artist’s paintings this week, “establishing a tension on his canvases between the spatially flat and the physically multidimensional.”
