Hanita
Ilan

I work mainly with painting, while stretching and challenging the limits of the medium. I often use traditional techniques of oil on canvas or paper, through which I confront the material with the image and the surface with the frame, to create works in which the figurative and the abstract are in constant tension.
My painting process is deeply connected to my religious upbringing. As a woman who grew up among strong religious and political ideologies, painting is the place where doubt and ambiguity can manifest and become an object of beauty and indulgence.
I work with paint to create a surface, and then, by spilling different kinds of fluids over such surface, I erase the surface and the painting is created through the dissolvement of the wet painted layers until an image is created. Coming from a background in archeology, I see my painting practice as a reversed digging process, where I dig deep to try to learn something about the future.
The images I paint are fragments derived from various sources such as archaeology, literature, art history, and general history. I draw from both common collective memory and rather intimate and personal experiences. Whether it’s an object or a figure, the painted image is always portrayed as a fraction or relic, as if salvaged from a disaster.
Certain images repeat in my works, becoming a kind of archetype. A report I read in the newspaper about a stone falling from the Wailing Wall (or “Kotel” in Hebrew) at the end of the Jewish fast day of Tisha B’Av became a symbolic object revealing a prophecy of both disaster and redemption. In the series ‘To be Interested in a Picture that No Longer Exists’, the ruined temples of Palmyra, Syria are depicted in through photos showing the before and after the ongoing war in Syria and the rule of the Islamic State (ISIS).
My practice is experimental and playful. I combine methods such as collaging, abstracting, fragmenting, deleting, and more. The image is revealed to me through the layers of paint on the surface, after which I juxtapose it with another image I choose. In my exhibitions, my paintings fit together into a non-linear story, where the difference between past and present is questioned and the border between real and fiction is blurred. My paintings do not attempt to give explanations, but instead create a terrain of turbulence, where truth becomes a matter of clues.