Guy Yanai is irreplaceable. Not simply his vibrant, structured style (though that too is unique,) each of Yanai’s paintings carries an air of individuality and transience. Seeing them for the first time is a new wave crashing on the shore of your subconscious, dousing you before receding again. At his new show at Praz-Delavallade, “The Caboose,” Yanai showcases a collection of works combining his distinctive palette of colors with dreamy, narrative scenes that inspire a deep wistfulness.

But this wistfulness isn’t grounded. Despite the strong, decisive brushstrokes, Yanai paints scenes that he hasn’t experienced, and are mostly drawn from photographs or films. Claire and her boyfriend (2021) or Pauline Reading (2021), for example, do not depict exact memories but rather ideas of memories – pleasurable moments that, in their non-existence, are as real as our memories. The pictorially flat and colorful scenes, be they a couple embracing, a figure reading alone, or a simple house-plant, are singular and unique from anything you might find in a nostalgic moment.

I’m beginning to think that nostalgia is a curse. The desire for a happiness never to return can blind you to the happiness which might exist right in front of you. And yet this desire is addictive; like any good curse, it draws you in before binding you in a wicked web. Nostalgia promises an ideal yet provides only an imitation – and a fleeting one at that.

To this effect, Yanai references the essayist Roland Barthes, quoting him thusly:

“This is to say the art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. … Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.”

While Barthes is talking about a streetcar, the sentiment also applies to the work of Guy Yanai. Each painting, while existing in concert with each other, are still independent and unique. They bring with them their own kind of joy, longing and profound. But unlike nostalgia, that accursed and remote bliss, the paintings of Guy Yanai are not perpetually out of your reach; they will summon the same vanished pleasure each and every time.

Praz-Delavallade
6150 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90048
Thru June 26th, 2021