JACOB EL HANANI

Constructing abstract pen and ink drawings that involve the artist applying thousands of marks by hand, El Hanani continues his trademark practice in _Drawing on Canvas _while incorporating his recent shift from working on paper to working on gessoed canvas on a much larger scale. The subtle, amorphous surfaces of these canvases upon closer inspection reveal dense webs of lines and patterns, built from repeated, rudimentary marks—often simple lines or circles. As the elemental forms grow into increasingly complex patterns, the entire canvas transforms into something much more than a summation of its parts. Day by day, El Hanani slowly creates these drawings over the course of months, his ceaseless labor equally as impressive as the resulting artworks.

El Hanani’s work is informed by the meditative rigor found in the Jewish practices and traditions in which he was raised. Most clearly, the artist is in dialogue with micrography, an ancient art of calligrams that once decorated Hebrew Bibles and religious manuscripts. Like these historic drawings, each small mark on El Hanani’s canvases is a gesture in storytelling and world-building.

In Linescape (From the Tohu Wa-bohu Series) (2022), the artist cites the Hebrew phrase “tohu wa-bohu,” which essentially translates to “chaos.” The work itself appears as a fractured composition, built from densely cross-hatched lines. As the artist told the writer Leslie Camhi earlier this year, in this series “there is no established order–the drawings evolve as I work on them, without self-imposed rules or strictures.” Despite the discipline required in making these works, El Hanani is just as interested in the intuitive, unmediated act of drawing.

Working on a more monumental scale, the canvases in this exhibition are characterized by a more freeform, atmospheric approach, less rooted in the denser, formal abstraction that defined his work in previous decades. Drawings such as Linescape From the Maria Helena Vieira Da Silva Series (2023-2024) and Quadric Urban Landscape (2022-2023) begin to approximate terrains, networks, or architectural diagrams. Vertical i_n Horizontal Landscape (Rain)_ (2023) uses soft flowing lines to great descriptive effect, creating the hazy sensation insinuated by the title’s rainy panorama. The artist’s recent engagement with the larger picture plane is also considered by Barry Schwabsky in the art historian’s essay for the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue. Schwabsky writes, El Hanani’s canvases are ‘about the luminous, hovering, nebulous, nondirectional space those lines generate precisely in collaboration with the human sensorium’s inability to focus on them fixedly as lines; the precision of the line generates the incandescent blur of the space.’