THE CHAIR AS A METAPHOR

Talia Rapaport

Meir Natif's paintings of chairs range between the mystery of contraction and the force of multiplicity,
between concentration on a single subject and the accumulative power of a series, and between
the personal associations of  "the chair"  and the added cultural values that it has annexed
to itself in the course of time.

The chair, as a basic image that appears frequently in art, immediately calls to mind a number of
contemporary materpieces like Joseph Beuys's "Chair with Fat", or Joseph Kosuth's "conceptual" chair,
but before that it is impossible not to recall Van Gogh, who painted his own chair and
Gauguin's chair as portraits representing the personalities of each of them.

In Israeli art too the chair has appeared frequently, and in the exhibition entitled "The Presence of the
Absent: The Empty Chair in Israeli Art", at the University Gallery (1991), the curator, Mordechai Omer,
assembled tens of works in which the chair functions in many divers ways: as a warm domestic item,
as an intimate object suffused with personal memories, as a ritual object, as an existential
and metaphysical element, as an absent human presence, etc.

The notion of the chair as representing human presence is well established in cultural consciousness,
but in the paintings of Meir Natif this is not a representation of a particular person, but of a state
of the soul. A state of the soul which extends beyond the personal plane and reflects a general
human existential sense. A state of tension, oppression, loneliness and anxiety, which is connected
to the existentialistic claim that anxiety is inherent in human nature, which recognizes its own
randomness and finitude and has alienation as its compamon.

It is difficult to speak about alienation because this "fashionable" concept is now hackneyed from
so much use and has already become almost a cliche. Nevertheless, the sense or essence it represents
is dominant in a considerable portion of contemporary artistic practice, so it cannot be evaded.
In Meir Natif's works the sense of alienation is produced not only by the empty chairs,
but also by means of the desolate spaces that encompass them, spaces bereft of human traits
or any sign of life. Whether it be an open and unbounded space or a closed cubic room-like space,
it is always a cold and exposed space, which evokes an oppressive and dismal atmosphere.