The empty chair is often associated with "The Presence of the Absent", yet Meir Natif's works are not
nourished upon fashionable concepts and theories, but on an inner sense that has been with him,
so he says, since he remembers himself. A sense of severance and notbelonging, and of a need for
self-protection from external reality by creating a painterly world that is enclosed within itself.
In the series of chairs, which is among the most extreme and expressionistic, this is sometimes already an
actual self-enclosure in hard, narrow and opaque spaces. The need for so hermetic a protection also
connects, perhaps, to the Gulf War, for most of these works were painted after it, but it would be
a mistake to relate the blocked and claustrophobic character of some of the paintings to this concrete
context alone. It would be more correct to see this as a stage in an ongoing process of reduction,
introversion, interiorization and dread of loneliness and death. This process began in Meir Natif's work
several years ago, in a series of paintings large clay jars that almost fill the entire surface and create
a closed space. They evoke a double association, of a living presence, on the one hand, and of a burial
vessel, on the other.
The series of chairs, like most of Meir Natif's other series, is marked by the dominance of gray, the color
of ash, charred earth, the end of life. At times the empty chairs look like monuments or tombstones.
On the back-rest of one of them there even appears the form of a cross -a sign which evokes associations
with of vases with a single, burnt and lifeless flower in them, and also found expression in a series of
paintings of cemeteries and death. Yet Meir Natif does not touch upon the distanced presence of death
by means of sublime themes, but through an everyday functional object like the chair.
This almost banal image enables him to sustain a connection with the concrete reality, but at the same time
he creates another world for himself, one that is severed and abstruse.
The chairs in his works are not taken from cultural contexts or imported from regions of the imagination
and of literature. Also not from The Chairs by Ionesco, which are course present in the recesses of his
cultural memory, but no more than that. These chairs are simply chairs from Natif's everyday surroundings,
or armchairs from his parents' or his grandfather's home, the forms of which have become engraved
in his sub-conscious and left a nostalgia-suffused emotional imprint there.
They serve him as a handhold on memories of family warmth, and as a means for grappling with the
fear of losing the people closest to him. These are not soft and inviting armchairs, but rigid ascetic ones,
their lines hardened by anxiety. One of them is postioned in a high and narrow space resembling
a solitary confinement prison-cell, with a bare light hanging above it, creating a sense of an interrogation
lamp, or of an abandoned house. This painting evokes memories of the spaces shaped like a
sealed transparent glass cube in the paintings of Francis Bacon. In those paintings too there is
sometimes a dangling naked lamp, below which there mostly occurs a violent and bloody struggle.
Inseveral of his paintings Meir Natif adopts this spatial structure that Bacon uses as a background for
the struggle for existence, but he eschews the attempt to make the human tragedy blatantly and
directly perceptible, and instead chooses much more economical and restrained means.
Natif voids the space almost entirely, interiorizes the anxiety and strives to arrive at a condensed,
ascetic, almost spiritual expression of the terror of death. What is strange is that despite the processes
of extreme eschewal and reduction, the tension and the alienation in his paintings are no less acerbic
than those in Bacon's violent scenes. Where Bacon releases a scream of pain that bursts out with
full force, Natif expresses an oppression that is profound, stifled and still.
