“I choose to paint portraits because I seek to paint the face – the identity, which in my view is the deepest experiential expression of the self. I aspire to encounter the truth in my life, and the truth in the human body lies, first and foremost, in its face; that is where the most direct and sensitive relationships between a person and their life take place. For me, the portrait is an attempt to discover something new within the most fixed subject in painting.”
Dean Shany’s paintings are created in a charged existential state, oscillating between attraction and threat, between vitality and danger. He describes his practice as existing in proximity to a threatening force – like living alongside a snake – a space where the possibility of harm coexists with a constant drive to continue, to act, to create.
Shany’s work seeks to touch upon processes of emergence – both self and of the world. In the working process, Shany relinquishes full control; he paints without prior planning, open to everything acting upon him in real-time, allowing materials, movements, and imagery to lead while listening to instincts and bodily and psychological responses. The painterly choices – color, line, gesture – stem not only from deliberation, but are an expression of inner knowledge, a sort of practical instinct revealed through the act of creation itself.
For Dean Shany, painting is essentially an act of inquiry: how it is possible to be, what the boundaries are between control and surrender, between freedom and threat, and between danger and vitality. The works offer a vulnerability that is not merely weakness, but also a condition for openness, touch, and the possibility of emergence.
Dean Shany and Carmel Goffer
Curator: Carmel Goffer
