Guy Yanai: Finding Time Again

Borrowing the title from Marcel Proust’s seventh and final volume of “In Search of Lost Time”, published posthumously in 1927, Guy Yanai presents in Finding Time Again ten paintings depicting a diverse range of subjects, including portraits, landscapes, interior scenes, and cinematic reminiscences.

In Finding Time Again, each painting serves as an entrancing vignette. Yanai recalls a moment from an Eric Rohmer film where a couple converses on a dock; he captures the gentle movement of gauzy curtains in front of interior doors overlooking the hills of Roucas-Blanc and the Plage du Prophète; he recreates a photograph of the French model Laetitia Casta, depicting her direct gaze at the camera. Gathering these moments under a Proustian title suggests thinking about how these works rely on access to, or recovery of, the artist’s own memories of experiences, images, or films—such as Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1987) and Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).