Miriam Cabessa is completing a circle. Ten years ago, when she was twenty nine years old, she became the first winner of the 1995 Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation prize for Israeli art, and had her very first solo exhibition in the Tel Aviv museum one year later. That was the beginning of what at least looked like the birth of an exceptionally successful art career.

No one in the Israeli art scene was surprised therefore, when two years later Cabessa was chosen to represent Israel at the 1997 Venice Bienale, and that in 1999 she spread her wings and flew of her safe Tel Avivi nest, with an ambitious determination to conquer the art scene of the Big Apple; she was also more than sufficiently equipped for her voyage, armed with a thick resume of twenty five art shows within which twelve solo exhibitions both in Israel and Europe.

Today she is coming back to Israel at least in spirit to participate in the celebrated group show, Dreaming Art Dreaming Reality, which marks the first ten year decade of the Gottesdiener award. The show, which had its grand opening at the Tel Aviv Museum a few weeks ago, includes, in addition to Cabessa, the nine other winners of the years which followed her initiation of the prize.

In 2003 I had my first personal acquaintance with Cabessa the person, when we had a few unusually unconventional and fascinating one on one sessions. As part of the research I was then preparing for an article I later wrote about her recent solo show at Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv. This time around, I once again quickly realized how, with her elegant signature charisma, she manipulated my failing attempts to conduct a well structured interview on the subject of her participation in the TAM exhibition and on other related issues, into a private stage for her solo show, where for the traditional interview technique of question answer question, there was absolutely no room left.

The “performance” she gave me on the other hand, was nevertheless intriguing, and it educated me quite a bit about her many opinions and ideas about art, New York, television, her future plans, and yes – also a little bit about her participation in Dreaming Art – Dreaming Reality.

For the show at the TAM, Cabessa has chosen to exhibit three colorful circles paintings from her solo show at Alon Segev Gallery in 2003, and in addition, a series of five video works – now presented for the first time – in which she is captured while working on other paintings in her signature style.

The five videos, which were shot in 2004, are located on the fascinating, although flimsy line between fine art and documentation; while employing minimal editing work and a curious sound track, they visually demonstrate for the first time the intriguing “trick” behind Cabessa’s famous painting technique, about which she was questioned countless times in the past.

In four out of the five videos, Cabessa’s work process is shown from beginning to end – opening with the virginal bright whiteness of the canvas, and concluding with the image of the completed painting.

Her exclusive working tools are her own bare palms, with an occasional use of a flatiron, a cloth rag or an old fashioned floor wiper. Only in one video, in which the film has been reversed in order to display the painting process from the end to its very beginning, the final painting appears to be slowly reduced into nothing; blindfolded with a scarf tightly wrapped around her head, Cabessa gradually “exposes” the white canvas that’s concealed beneath it, alternately using her hands and a soft lump of sponge.

This is the one piece which undoubtedly escapes the question of documentation concerning the other four.

The formation process of the mysterious, hologram like images, that appear on the surface under the sensuous movements of her hands massaging and stroking it softly inevitably hypnotizes the viewer, not to say – turns him on all together; the position of her leaning body over the canvas, horizontally placed on top of a large, sturdy table, further enables the association of a love making scene between her and the painting; even when she slowly “irons”, or “cleans” the canvas with a floor wiper drenched with paint, she still looks like the cleaning lady of love, completely infatuated with her labor.

It’s not easy to be different in today’s world of so many similarities and copied ideas, but Miriam Cabbesa certainly stands out among her colleagues painters for her distinctive approach that excludes the use of basic painting instrument – the brush. Instead of it, she engages her fingers, hands and sometimes entire body to transfer the paint onto her monumental canvases. Her method, known as meditative “slow action painting” often includes various objects too, like combs, squeegees and keffiyeh and tallit headdress. Using the repeating, choreographed movements, the artist creates abstract, symmetrical forms and mostly monochromatic compositions in accordance with the tendency to reduced palette, most recently enriched with gold.
Liberating the Viewer’s Imagination
Cabessa was born in Morocco but raised in Israel where she gained her education. First attending Cultural Studies at Camera Obscura School for the arts in Tel Aviv, she later finished Ha’Midrasha College of Art in Ramat HaSharon and Kalisher College of Art, Tel Aviv. Her great breakthrough on the international artistic scene occurred in 1997 when she represented Israel at the Venice Biennale. The artist became known for her distinctive method of applying paint onto the canvas with the use of her body and various objects instead of brushes. Creating imagery that ranges from organic to mechanistic, her compositions are the result of her repeating gestures. The limited palette is reduced mostly on black and white with a rare implementation of matt hues of red, yellow or purple. Dragging her hands and various other objects across the canvas, she creates paintings made up of thousands of tiny lines. Observed up close, details could be interpreted as grooves in a vinyl record or the lines of a heart monitor, but a few steps away, the negative and positive images resemble the X-ray snapshots, the sepia photographs, or maybe the panoramic view of the Rocky Mountain. There lies the true excitement for the viewer whose perception and imagination are challenged all the time.
Cabessa had her first solo art show in Tel Aviv in Israel
Rewards and Selected Exhibitions
As the recipient of the numerous awards such as Arts Prize for Young Artists in Israel (1995) and the prize from the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation (1994 and 1995), Cabessa for the first time exhibited solo in Tel Aviv in 1994 and after which her work became a part of the collections of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Haifa Museum of Modern Art, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and Texas State University. The artist performed Variation with Hands, with music by Jonathan Sheffer, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2012), exhibited at Nye+Brown Gallery in Los Angeles (2012), and had a solo show at Julie M. Gallery in Tel Aviv (2014). She has also shown at the Morris Museum, Herzilya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel, The Israel Museum, Ben-Ari Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel, the Jewish Museum of Pittsburgh, and the Kresge Art Museum.

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Tibi joins the art scene in celebration of their pre-fall collection

Tibi is beloved for the painterly prints and patterns that are splashed across their cult-status midi skirts and crop tops, but the brand’s love for art goes much further. This evening at their Soho store Tibi will unveil its latest artistic endeavor, a partnership with three emerging artists from @60inches, a highly curated website that provides customers with personal art advisors, insider access and affordable recommendations. Miriam Cabessa, Vincent Edmond Louis and Jason Varone—three artists hand-picked from a pool of over 70 candidates—were each asked to create a piece inspired by Tibi’s pre-fall collection (shown above), all of which will be on sale within the store until June 30th. “I’m excited to partner with @60″ on this event because they support rising artists and give them a platform to display and sell their work,” said Tibi’s founder and creative director, Amy Smilovic. “When I meet with artists, and the ones we are working with, they literally refuel me. Their love and intensity for what they do is so inspiring and infectious.”

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In a new exhibition, Miriam Cabessa offers clients the option of buying her work. The pleasure of the show derives from the artist’s trust in her audience – and vice versa.
Miriam Cabessa’s painting style doesn’t begin from a sentence or from a word. It begins from a more basic element: a syllable. Or even earlier – from a stutter so heavy that the first syllable of what is trying to find expression doesn’t succeed in making its way out, in being uttered. For many years, the first and central gesture by Cabessa – an artist who paints by means of action and body – has been the externalization of difficulties of pronunciation. Grunt work. It’s not only what’s trying to be expressed by means of this language, it’s the very notion of being “slow of tongue.” Aaaaaart.
In the course of nearly 20 years, Cabessa developed this condition into a particularly rich painterly language, using it to create impressive pyrotechnics of abstract works in oils on nonabsorbent Masonite, with a recognizable image emerging only at the extremities. Marks of an iron. Skulls. Fingers. Signs of wiping. As products created by the usage of anything that is not a paintbrush, by a repetitive trembling movement across the surface and the imprint of their paint-dipped remnants on it, these became the signature mark of her work. That work is a source of constant astonishment in its diversified inventiveness, in the physicality that informs the artistic act, in the disciplined choreology that constructs crescendos of compositions. This way of creating reached its peak in Cabessa’s performance works in recent years.
In her new show, Cabessa has abandoned the Masonite platform and 
replaced it with rolls of sticky plastic of the kind that can be bought in art and hardware stores for use in covering and wrapping surfaces. The painted strips have been glued to the walls of the Julie M. Gallery in Tel Aviv from end to end. It’s a landscape without a beginning and without an end, a continuing line. What emerges is a kind of uniform lung 
volume – for her painting and for the gallery – and the duration of the breath needed for the protracted stutter is 
identical to the metrical space. Effectively, her storyboard or painterly ECG measures the gallery.
“In the past few years I have often tried to do action painting, with the intention of not moving,” Cabessa told Avital Burg in an interview in Haaretz in 2010, adding, “I use my breathing to create a certain rhythm, the breathing creates the rhythms of the smearing [of paint]. What happened is that I went from large body movements to contraction, almost to the point of desiring not to move and only to allow the breath to dictate the movement.” In fact, at moments it seems that this time, Cabessa’s hand barely moved, that the roll of plastic material ran under her like a record under a 
phonograph needle.
Black stains are painted at the beginning on the right, being two portraits in profile. This evokes the well-known visual paradox of the portraits and the goblet (do we see two black profiles 
facing each other, or a white goblet against a black background?), according to which our gaze can take in only one image at a time – it’s impossible to see both and to apprehend the totality. We are prisoners of our perception. This is also an exposition of a painting story that begins with Raffi Lavie, who used such profiles consistently, though with him they are curls of cigarette smoke: the vase was painted separately.
From the left silhouette, a black-blue, blinking broken line stretches in a slow smear, shimmering like a print whose color is leaching from it. Small events are added and subtracted along the line – yellow-orange-red hues, layers, spirals, powerful scratches whose momentum emanates from the shoulder become five musical notes on the narrow roll, peaks of hills, black roads crossed by grayish dividing lines, lava, Rorschach, eyes with dilated pupils, X-ray prints, messy smears in the Janine Antoni style (“Loving Care,” 1992). Antoni dipped her hair in a bucket of paint and, kneeling, smeared it across a surface. After all, both she and Cabessa, as contemporary women, and with the use of very similar means (body massage), are responding to the masculine ethic of the great masters Yves Klein and Jackson Pollock, the precedent-setting action painters.
Still, what is of prime interest in the exhibition – which this time lacks the artist’s most impressive work – is not visible in the gallery space itself. The interest lies in the switch from painting format to textile logic: the linear meter. In addition to the sticker-paintings that will be scraped off the wall and thrown out at the conclusion of the exhibition, the gallery has many more painted – and unaffixed – rolls in its storerooms, which can be purchased in any size. The client will decide for himself how many linear meters he wants, and thereby will also decide where the painting ends (and, by the same token, where the painting of the next client begins). The buy-what-you-please option starts with a 
minimum length of a meter, extending to 
a panorama and all the way to a wall painting. You can also install the piece you buy lengthwise, if you fancy a portrait painting. There’s much potential here, both commercially and as a wicked joke on the world of commerce.
What looks like a fledgling marketing trick or a tactical variation on previous actions, can also be examined in terms of the enhancement of the concept of randomness in Cabessa’s work. As another element in the intra-artistic struggle involving arbitrariness, 
automatism, blind bodily decisions. As another stage in Cabessa’s very candid conversation with her viewers over the pronunciation of the forms by means of their erasure. This time it’s the arbitrariness of the composition, which is sliced off at points not decided beforehand. It’s not only she, the artist, who is making gestures – the collectors, too, are required to enter the universe of tough calls: how to begin, where to end. Like her, they are called on to set pace / price.
Cabessa is one of the very few 
artists of her generation (she was born in 1966) who remained loyal to the manner of painting they developed at the outset. She didn’t discard it in 
favor of various trends, and she 
continually deepened the language she invented – whenever it seemed that her technique had exhausted itself, an additional subform was 
articulated.
Cabessa’s current exhibition doesn’t reflect a large step in her work. It is more a minor examination of another particular possibility within an artistic structure of operation whose foundations are already known. Now she is experimenting with an unpretentious offshoot of a familiar principle.
The particular pleasure in this 
exhibition lies in accompanying the artist along this impressive road, out of curiosity and receptivity to different vocal attempts within the language, even if these do not show a shift or a distinctive turn in the totality of her work. It’s a matter of loyalty; of relations of trust between artist and audience; and of a response to the question of what type of audience there should be. What type of audience an artist like this – who, like Moshe Kupferman, perseveres in a life project of almost-the-same – 
deserves to have. For artists of this special breed, who do not force-feed the audience with amazing new thrills in every new season, and whose
numbers are diminishing in these frenetic times, we need patience of the marathon kind with which they themselves create. To that end, we must also be ready to say that the permission an artist grants himself to take things slowly, to spend years developing nuances, is a matter of 
inner freedom.

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Miriam Cabessa is completing a circle. Ten years ago, when she was twenty nine years old, she became the first winner of the 1995 Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation prize for Israeli art, and had her very first solo exhibition in the Tel Aviv museum one year later. That was the beginning of what at least looked like the birth of an exceptionally successful art career.

No one in the Israeli art scene was surprised therefore, when two years later Cabessa was chosen to represent Israel at the 1997 Venice Bienale, and that in 1999 she spread her wings and flewwest of her safe Tel Avivi nest, with an ambitious determination to conquer the art scene of the Big Apple; she was also more than sufficiently equipped for her voyage, armed with a thick resume of twenty five art shows within which twelve solo exhibitions both in Israel and Europe.

Today she is coming back to Israel at least in spirit to participate in the celebrated group show, Dreaming Art Dreaming Reality, which marks the first ten year decade of the Gottesdiener award. The show, which had its grandopening at the Tel Aviv Museum a few weeks ago, includes, in addition to Cabessa, the nine other winners of the years which followed her initiation of the prize.

In 2003 I had my first personal acquaintance with Cabessa the person, when we had a few unusually unconventional and fascinating one on one sessions,

as part of the research I was then preparing for an article I later wrote about her recent solo show at Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv. This time around, I once again quickly realized how, with her elegant signature charisma, she manipulated my failing attempts to conduct a well structured interview on the subject of her participation in the TAM exhibition and on other related issues, into a private stage for her solo show, where for the traditional interview technique of question answer question, there was absolutely no room left.

The “performance” she gave me on the other hand, was nevertheless intriguing, and it educated me quite a bit about her many opinions and ideas about art, New York, television, her future plans, and yes – also a little bit about her participation in Dreaming Art – Dreaming Reality.

For the show at the TAM, Cabessa has chosen to exhibit three colorful circles paintings from her solo show at Alon Segev Gallery in 2003, and in addition, a series of five video works – now presented for the first time – in which she is captured while working on other paintings in her signature style.

The five videos, which were shot in 2004, are located on the fascinating, although flimsy line between fine art and documentation; while employing minimal editing work and a curious sound track, they visually demonstrate for the first time the intriguing “trick” behind Cabessa’s famous painting technique, about which she was questioned countless times in the past.

In four out of the five videos, Cabessa’s work process is shown from beginning to end – opening with the virginal bright whiteness of the canvas, and concluding with the image of the completed painting.

Her exclusive working tools are her own bare palms, with an occasional use of a flatiron, a cloth rag or an old fashioned floor wiper. Only in one video, in which the film has been reversed in order to display the painting process from the end to its very beginning, the final painting appears to be slowly reduced into nothing; blindfolded with a scarf tightly wrapped around her head, Cabessa gradually “exposes” the white canvas that’s concealed beneath it, alternately using her hands and a soft lump of sponge.

This is the one piece which undoubtedly escapes the question of documentation concerning the other four.

The formation process of the mysterious, hologram like images, that appear on the surface under the sensuous movements of her hands massaging and stroking it softly inevitably hypnotizes the viewer, not to say – turns him on all together; the possition of her leaning body over the canvas, horizontally placed on top of a large, sturdy table, further enables the association of a love making scene between her and the painting; even when she slowly “irons”, or “cleans” the canvas with a floor wiper drenched with paint, she still looks like the cleaning lady of love, completely infatuated with her labor.

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Miriam Cabessa’s paintings are a breath of fresh air to the San Francisco market. Born in Morocco and raised in Israel, her work has obvious Eastern influences that you won’t find from artists of the Bay Area. In place of bold colors and figurative images, Cabessa current show, Hands On, at the the Dryansky Gallery favors delicate, abstract details in calm tones — all hung horizontally as if they could be read like text. Where local artists’ creations are “cool,” Cabessa’s are meditative.
Created by combining oil paint and gold dust that is then dragged across the canvas with her hands and with various fabrics, the results are pieces made up of thousands and thousands of tiny lines. When the viewer puts her nose right up to the canvas, the little details could be grooves in a vinyl record or the jagged lines of a heart monitor. But take a few steps back, and the entire painting takes on a new form: Those same details could be sepia photographs, zen gardens, or even a panoramic view of the Rocky Mountains — something that’s particularly fun to imagine, given that one of the main components is gold. (Which, by the way, looks particularly magical in the piece hung by the gallery’s main window. Note to buyer: Invest in bay windows.)
Aside from the gold and oil images, Hands On also features several works done in liquified graphite on paper. For these, Cabessa’s process is similar — that is, sliding materials across the surface with fabric. But in this graphite series, there are two pieces that depart from the look of the others. These look more like drip paintings. Although they are busier and less fluid than the others, they bring in a needed dynamism to the show. (This is one of the few sticking points in Hands On. If you’re one to “get lost in a piece,” the show’s repetition will keep you enthralled for hours. If your attention span is less than impressive, it will be a shorter visit.) One of the drip paintings even features large patches of blank space. It’s a mystery how the spaces were created, and as a result, the lack of color becomes hypnotizing.
There are barely two weeks left to catch the show, which, surprisingly, is located in the Marina. Known more for its killer views than its killer arts scene, it’s refreshing to see the The Dryansky Gallery — which opened only in October of 2014 — in the neighborhood.
Come for the views, stay for the artwork, and run away before happy hour on Chestnut Street lets out.

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Miriam Cabessa’s paintings bear the traces of direct encounters between her body and her materials of choice. Cabessa has eschewed the use of paint brushes since her time at the Midrasha College of Art in the early 1990’s, where she created works on photographic paper, kissing the paper fervently and experimenting in with the use of urine and heat from an electric iron to leave an imprint on the paper’s surface. Ever since then, she has expanded her vocabulary of painting, primarily using her hands and fingers and incorporating combs, irons, squeegees, glasses, rags and sponges into her painting process.
The Moroccan-born artist moved to Israel with her family as a child. The family settled in Tiberias in northern Israel and her entrepreneur mother opened a sewing school and managed a Maskit shop, selling and producing decorative arts, ethnic embroidery textiles, clothing and jewelry. Her father, a trumpet player, was an avid fan of Picasso and used to create replicas of his paintings. Cabessa and her elder sister were tutored by a Tiberian painter. She describes her childhood home as “an artistic house with a special cultural mix of Mediterranean music, American jazz and Arabic films”.
After her parents separated, Cabessa moved with her mother to Germany. A year later, she returned to Israel by herself at the tender age of 13, to a Kibbutz in the Jordan valley, Sha’ar HaGolan. Cabessa recollects: “I grew up in the Kibbutz alone, without my parents, and I adopted people who I cherished to form a self chosen family.” She decided to become an artist early on in life: “When I was six years old, I made a vow to myself that I would become a painter. It seemed evident to me that painting came hand in hand with discipline and daily practice, and from the age of 6 to the age of 24 I never missed one day of painting,” says Cabessa.
While painting incessantly, Cabessa practiced martial arts, obtaining a brown belt in Karate. She also tamed Arabian horses and was an equine midwife, assisting mares to give birth. “I used to train horses in the unique discipline of Dressage, challenging them to perform predetermined dance-like movements. The act almost defies gravity – causing the massive steeds to nearly glide,” Cabessa notes. In her paintings, she recreates the same sense of wonder, using her hands and taming the humblest domestic objects to produce miraculous choreographies on the yielding surface of a canvas, masonite, paper or aluminium sheet.
At the age of 21, Cabessa moved to Tel Aviv and studied at the Kalisher College of Art and at the Midrasha College of Art. A mere two years after completing her studies, she exhibited a solo show at Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv. In 1996 she was the recipient of the Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize and presented an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. In 1997 she represented Israel at the Venice Biennale and in 2000 she moved to New York City. She currently divides her time between Israel and the U.S, maintaining two studios, located in south Tel Aviv and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
In 2009, the artist began to generously share her painting process with the viewers in the form of live performances. “I noticed that the audience becomes emotionally attached to the painted image, wincing every time it is erased and rubbed away. While conjuring an image and removing it over and over again, the technique brings to mind Japanese zen gardens – creating intricate patterns in the sand with a rake and then erasing them altogether,” says Cabessa. The gestural marks and ghostly layers of paint gradually compose the palimpsest quality of her performative paintings.

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Sitting down with an artist is always an enlightening experience. It’s a wonderful opportunity to learn about their process, the inspiration for their work, and how they see themselves within the larger art culture. This is what we discovered when sitting down with Miriam Cabessa at her first solo exhibit at the Jenn Singer Gallery in Gramercy Park titled, Anthropometry. The cornerstone of our conversation: her evocative paintings, and her unique method for bringing them into the world.
Cabessa has global roots. Living in New York for more than a decade, her heritage spans both Morocco and Israel. Art is in her DNA. Her father was a jazz trumpet player, who, when he could no longer find places to play in Israel, worked as an artist, creating reproductions of Picassos to make ends meet. Cabessa’s work is about her own need for self-expression, both sensual and feminine, her paintings give voice to women whose experiences have long been overlooked in art and the world beyond.
“When you look at art history I can’t base my own [work] on women painters. [I asked] how do I bring something that is not the [male] tradition to painting? I started using tools that you use to clean the house – squeegies, rugs, an iron. I used black paint, garbage cans, plates, cups. It was a comment about women and the arts. Instead of cleaning, I’m making it dirty.”
With Cabessa’s work, there is an interaction with each piece. A conversation between the artist and her canvas that the viewer can experience. Books, letters and personal objects make up the work that is in Anthropometry, and it’s as if each piece is an x-ray or impression from her life. “I wanted something real. I’m not creating an illusion. I’m creating an action and that action becomes the image,” says Cabessa.
Having left behind the paint brush years ago, her paintings are made literally by hand. “Yves Klein used models to paint and actually used them to create the painting. He was standing there with a suit and telling the women what to do. I took it another step using my own body and objects that I put on the surface. So I’m having a little discussion with Yves Klein. I’m doing something that is much more feminine. For me it’s translating a feeling, emotion and even an understanding.” Cabessa loves the challenge in creating each piece. “In my work I want to be challenged,” she says. “I’m challenging myself to create a different image.”
The works themselves are deeply personal and transformative – changing our perception of the materials as we take in the larger work. A nondescript book spine becomes an erotic allusion. Love letters take on the shape of landscapes. Open pages are formed into a sunset. “I like the transformation in art. Something you take and you touch it and it becomes something else,” says Cabessa. “Every image here has a different energy to it and I am the tool.”

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Curated and Written by Sarah Breitberg-Semel

Miriam Cabessa’s work, on first encounter, causes a moment of disorientation: What does she show here, so naked and near that it makes my head reel, so strange and familiar that no readymade phrases can be picked to describe it? And instantly, in the selfsame breath: How does this painting happen? What technique is used to make it look like that? What’s the trick? What mad rhythm is behind this curious undertaking?

I remember walking home from her studio after she has shown me how simple it is – how the hands, moving rhythmically on the thin, wet masonite surface, leave their imprint; how, with the hand grasping a glass, that same rhythm creates the metallic pipes; how a small iron comb, in rotation, generates the screen of iron springs. The spell had been broken, yet the feeling remained that her body alone is capable of generating that movement, that rhythm, the choreography that creates the bizarre, charmed location which is her painting. Writing about her, wheresoever I take it, must embrace the point of departure, the uniqueness of Cabessa’s body-movement that has generated this artistic enterprise. Here is a singular knowing body, and I infused in the world in a non-reproducible encounter that sets it apart from an other I.

Few artists nowadays attune their work to talent as physical proficiency, to an I as such proficiency, or to a self-investigation at all. Cabessa proposes the movement of her body as the last place the world could overpower, the ultimate barricade of the self. It is not cogito, nor a critical approach in the conventional sense; but it is a very strong and principled point of resistance to control and surveillance. It is the body that knows, the inner rhythm, the eroticism, the libido – and they cannot be dominated or appropriated by the coercive systems of the state or cultural institutions. The mere existence of this place extends hope as to the feasibility of resistance and rebellion. The manifestations of these personal proficiencies are, in Cabessa’s case, outstanding in their peculiarity, and consequently highly credible in the contention they propose; rebellion is launched from the specific eroticity of the body.

However, the mysterious choreography of Cabessa’s physical movements does not take place before my eyes. What I see, on a two-dimensional board, are traces of this performance, solidified signs of past movement, clad in new form as a screen of signs, the great enemy of the authentic I. It is this silent testimony, transformed into a renewed and different creature, which emerges before more eyes.

Beyond doubt, Cabessa’s work touches upon Surrealism. It reopens in the history of art when the world, seen through innocent eyes and with unconscious raised to the surface, was experienced as astounding and mysterious. And it is not only the paintings’ look (“the convulsive beauty,” “the marvelous” required by André Breton) that points in that direction; her technique too has links with automatic writing, imprints, frottage, all those techniques the Surrealists themselves fostered so as to recover the virginal sight, the jamais vu, the uncanny complement of the déja vu. What singles Cabessa out in relation to this historical enterprise is how she herself becomes the subject of the painting; and even more so, how photography becomes an integral part of her paintings’ structure. A new I emerges, “I in the expanded field,” a hybrid creation of the camera-body and, in a broader sense, an organic-technological hybrid suggesting a novel physical experience.

The body is the first machine, and it is also the organism yearning for contact. It embraces the technological as part of itself, it is order and disorder, male and female, total control and absolute helplessness; it is nature and the spectacle just as it is the real – but also the screen of signs, the screen of death. It is the multi-faceted I, gliding playfully between various and artistic styles, in its own swift fashion applying minimalism, expressionism, action-painting and surrealism. Its span is creature, ready for the new world poised on the threshold. Cabessa has switched on the power on her guitar. She is an electric guitar. She samples herself. She is Techno-Cabessa, a renowned mutation that generates painting – that most anachronistic of media, taken for dead and left behind.

Cabessa, “I camera,” started her career a few years ago with an imprint of urination and heat strokes (electric heater, iron) on photographic papers. Already then it was a matter of swift action: touch, concentration of high energy and eliminating the distance associated with the camera. The series was completed with the portraits: a woman of kisses created by kissing the photographic paper, and a woman of money made of frottaged coins. These two women have defined the narcissism-tinted erotomania characteristic of her work, and its exchange value when metamorphosed into art. The Kisses-Woman is like a light cloud over the photographic paper, a hazy form – and the Money-Woman, with her harsh rhythm and monotonous precision, foreshadows the metallic pipes that will later erupt from Cabessa’s painting, ostensibly from her body.

Cabessa’s transition from photography to painting is highly specific. It consists of transferring the photographic process to the medium of painting. This is not painting in the ordinary sense, but painting emulating photography. Its bedding – the thin, bright masonite, smeared with a thin layer of wet dark paint – is, in effect, a reconstruction of the photographic paper, the layer of paint being the photosensitive layer that Cabessa works on with her touch. Any touch wipes away the wet dark paint, as if exposing the touched spots to the light. The bright masonite board beneath the layer of wet paint, revealed by the touch, marks the exposure to light. A quasi-photographic process is brought about, effected in a painting that could be defined as simulation of photography. This dual creature, photo-painting, enables tactile contact with the material, but also has the painting overshadowed by another origin – photography, of which the painting is merely a reconstruction, a replica, a simulation. In Cabessa’s hands, photography – regarded ever since Walter Benjamin’s renowned essay as epitome of mechanical reproduction, questioning the legitimacy of auratic, unique painting – becomes the original of which the painting is a mere reproduction. It is a rebirth of painting from photography, painting that unfolds the relation between photography and painting so that each one is both the other’s mirror and its sources. That particular I, for whose emergence – emergence of that origin latent within her body – Cabessa posits the conditions, also manifests itself as fabricated I, whose birth involves a visual conspiracy casting doubt on its own existence.

What painting grants Cabessa – and photography denies – is a rapid registration of her movements over the wet masonite board, a record of movement in time. What is registered as movement in the extremities of her body encountering the world: palms extended, soles of the feet stamping and the mouth kissing. Sporadically, she slides some object – glass, squeegee, rag, small iron comb – over the wet surface. The repertoire of the movements and accessories has been cut back, and the principle at work is building by means of rhythmical repetition of the selfsame movement. In contrast with the sensatory, libidal uniqueness underlying Cabessa’s work – uniqueness here finds expressions, oddly enough, in her knack for turning automat, robot, machine. Paradoxically, the body’s uniqueness and authenticity come across in its skill for emulating a machine. Just as her painting takes its cue from photography, as is her manual reproduction, her transformation of the organic into a printing machine, the basis for possession of a non-reproducible body. Something that sounds rather tiresome when put into words is translated in the painting into a chilling sight: mechanically barely concealing the organic, a flow resting upon continual fragmentation or fragmentation evolving into flow, an undeciphered hybrid, without beginning or end, whose dual, mechanical-biological foundations merge into a splendidly repulsive sight, mysterious and intra-corporeal, alien, a planet as remote and familiar as the I.

This exhibition packs in three formulations of Cabessa’s work, that can be described in relation to the position of the eye in the painting. In the first paintings – the most predominant hitherto, which have characterized her work in recent years – the physical movement and the act of touching are followed by Cabessa’s camera-eye, which generates the intrusive close-up or blow-up look of the works. Rosalind Krauss’ essay on surrealistic photography depicts the camera as an artificial limb ameliorating the deficient vision of the human eye:

“The camera-eyes see faster, sharper, at stranger angles, closer-to, microscopically, with a transposition of tonalities, with the penetration of X-ray, and with access to the multiplication of images. […It is] an extraordinary extension of normal vision, on that supplements the deficiencies of the naked eye. The camera covers and arms this nakedness, it acts as a kind of prosthesis, enlarging the capacity of the human body. […] Thus what supplements and enlarges human vision also supplants the viewer himself; the camera is the aid who comes to usurp.”[1]

In Cabessa’s case, the camera-eye is her own physical attribute; the location to which it penetrates by means of her camera-eye may be the interior of her own body, or the body of another. The sight seems close, too close, obscenely close, pornographic. The dark, mysterious places that have revealed – where intrusive hands seek to fathom depths and reveal secrets, where joining pipes writhe – may perhaps be what Luce Irigaray terms “walking through the look glass” to the location of the Mystérique – mysterious, hysterical, mystical. This is the “dark night of the soul,” the natural location for the femininity lurking behind every mirror – or, alternately, still resorting to Irigaray’s terms, the vision of the concave speculum, the mirror gynecologists use in internal observation of the female sex organs, which enables seeing the woman’s sex organ not as a hole, as (Freudian terms) absence, but as something extant, something visible but without an end. These works, comprising liquid mechanics and metallurgy, are generated by touch, by automatic body language achieving total control by means of Cabessa’s camera-eye regulating the movement, generating the uniformity, the sharp, intrusive look devoid of melancholy.

But Cabessa has yet another, softer seeing, where the camera eyes are shut, the metal is drained from the body and the organs are seen through the naked, defenseless eye. The body organs, divorced from one another, are view from afar, through a drab mist, the accompanying melancholy enveloping the body parts – soft, delicate, trimmed, trickling, lost, without direction, without origin and without purpose other than primordial palpitations, hand reaching for hand, foot reaching for foot. In the grey series – whose heroine is “old fashioned” humanity – the painting, engendered by movement and touch on the board, is conveyed by the naked eye as a tale, strange and distant, about hovering, functionless, organs of a non-existent body.

The third formulation, created these past few months, is armed neither with camera nor naked eye; it is created with eyes shut, the hands moving over the sensitive layer for thirty seconds. The series that shuts the eye’s cycle reverts to Robert Morris and his Blind Time – a series he repeated in four different versions in the course of the past thirty years. Morris was preceded in his “blind drawing” by the Romanian surrealist Victor Brauner, whose experimentation with automatic writing included drawing with shut eyes. The series is totally tactile (a quality conventionally considered feminine, in contrast with the masculine, Cartesian scopic-regime). The hands shuffle over the black board in a groping, scratching movement. The familiar automatic movement appears in sporadic flashes only to disappear again, making way for the body stumbling against itself, unarmed. The blended cultures of vision and darkness, body and spectacle – the amalgam that characterized the formulation predominant in Cabessa’s work – makes way for painting of dark communication, painting appertaining to cave culture, unaware and ignorant of sunlight’s brightness. The only eye capable of involvement in such a painting is the pineal eye of Georges Bataille, the inner eye that has no field of vision, or in the words of Emmanuel Lévinas: “Regard in the sense of caring this meant keeping the eyes shut thwarting the violent ‘avidity of the gaze’.”[2]

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[1] Rosalind Krauss. “Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths. (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986), pp. 116-117
[2] Emmanuel Lévinas. Total and Infinity. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 58

Miriam Cabessa is completing a circle. Ten years ago, when she was twenty nine years old, she became the first winner of the 1995 Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation prize for Israeli art, and had her very first solo exhibition in the Tel Aviv museum one year later. That was the beginning of what at least looked like the birth of an exceptionally successful art career.

No one in the Israeli art scene was surprised therefore, when two years later Cabessa was chosen to represent Israel at the 1997 Venice Bienale, and that in 1999 she spread her wings and flewwest of her safe Tel Avivi nest, with an ambitious determination to conquer the art scene of the Big Apple; she was also more than sufficiently equipped for her voyage, armed with a thick resume of twenty five art shows within which twelve solo exhibitions both in Israel and Europe.

Today she is coming back to Israel at least in spirit to participate in the celebrated group show, Dreaming Art Dreaming Reality, which marks the first ten year decade of the Gottesdiener award. The show, which had its grandopening at the Tel Aviv Museum a few weeks ago, includes, in addition to Cabessa, the nine other winners of the years which followed her initiation of the prize.

In 2003 I had my first personal acquaintance with Cabessa the person, when we had a few unusually unconventional and fascinating one on one sessions,

as part of the research I was then preparing for an article I later wrote about her recent solo show at Alon Segev Gallery in Tel Aviv. This time around, I once again quickly realized how, with her elegant signature charisma, she manipulated my failing attempts to conduct a well structured interview on the subject of her participation in the TAM exhibition and on other related issues, into a private stage for her solo show, where for the traditional interview technique of question answer question, there was absolutely no room left.

The “performance” she gave me on the other hand, was nevertheless intriguing, and it educated me quite a bit about her many opinions and ideas about art, New York, television, her future plans, and yes – also a little bit about her participation in Dreaming Art – Dreaming Reality.

For the show at the TAM, Cabessa has chosen to exhibit three colorful circles paintings from her solo show at Alon Segev Gallery in 2003, and in addition, a series of five video works – now presented for the first time – in which she is captured while working on other paintings in her signature style.

The five videos, which were shot in 2004, are located on the fascinating, although flimsy line between fine art and documentation; while employing minimal editing work and a curious sound track, they visually demonstrate for the first time the intriguing “trick” behind Cabessa’s famous painting technique, about which she was questioned countless times in the past.

In four out of the five videos, Cabessa’s work process is shown from beginning to end – opening with the virginal bright whiteness of the canvas, and concluding with the image of the completed painting.

Her exclusive working tools are her own bare palms, with an occasional use of a flatiron, a cloth rag or an old fashioned floor wiper. Only in one video, in which the film has been reversed in order to display the painting process from the end to its very beginning, the final painting appears to be slowly reduced into nothing; blindfolded with a scarf tightly wrapped around her head, Cabessa gradually “exposes” the white canvas that’s concealed beneath it, alternately using her hands and a soft lump of sponge.

This is the one piece which undoubtedly escapes the question of documentation concerning the other four.

The formation process of the mysterious, hologram like images, that appear on the surface under the sensuous movements of her hands massaging and stroking it softly inevitably hypnotizes the viewer, not to say – turns him on all together; the possition of her leaning body over the canvas, horizontally placed on top of a large, sturdy table, further enables the association of a love making scene between her and the painting; even when she slowly “irons”, or “cleans” the canvas with a floor wiper drenched with paint, she still looks like the cleaning lady of love, completely infatuated with her labor.

Jenn Singer Gallery proudly presents an•thro•pom•e•try, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based Moroccan Israeli artist Miriam Cabessa. Since representing Israel at the Venice Biennial in 1997, Cabessa has gained international recognition with work held in prestigious private and public collections including The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Haifa Museum of Modern Art; and The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
Noted collector, curator and philanthropist Tim Nye’s text on the exhibition offers perfect insight into Cabessa’s sensual, expressionist paintings: “I love the use of the term ‘anthropometry’ to describe the work of Miriam Cabessa. She is in good company with ‘Anthropometry Paintings’ as the description Yves Klein used for his trademark blue body prints of women. The cool scientific implication is offset by the incongruous combination of ‘poetry’ and ‘anthropology’”.
In creating her newest body of work, Cabessa used personal items – love letters, her favorite books, diary entries, etc. – coated in paint and then pressed onto panel or canvas. The imprints these emotionally meaningful objects leave behind are interestingly suggestive, sometimes erotic and sometimes reminiscent of scientific slides – alive with texture and patterns. Regardless of how they reveal themselves, the secrets of the artist are buried under layers of paint, turning fingerprints of nostalgia into abstract imagery.
Nye describes the new collection as “‘Memory Paintings”, writing that “…the imprint is more fossil than print, as she uses objects that should only reveal superficial contours. The words— the pulsing blood —through the mystical conjuring of the artist are also revealed… The halo of the image vibrates like a Rothko; but it’s as if her attempts to anchor the object on canvas are futile, and the memory does not want to adhere, but floats from the surface and retreats to the depths of the artist’s’ private interior”.

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Sitting down with an artist is always an enlightening experience. It’s a wonderful opportunity to learn about their process, the inspiration for their work, and how they see themselves within the larger art culture. This is what we discovered when sitting down with Miriam Cabessa at her first solo exhibit at the Jenn Singer Gallery in Gramercy Park titled, Anthropometry. The cornerstone of our conversation: her evocative paintings, and her unique method for bringing them into the world.
Cabessa has global roots. Living in New York for more than a decade, her heritage spans both Morocco and Israel. Art is in her DNA. Her father was a jazz trumpet player, who, when he could no longer find places to play in Israel, worked as an artist, creating reproductions of Picassos to make ends meet. Cabessa’s work is about her own need for self-expression, both sensual and feminine, her paintings give voice to women whose experiences have long been overlooked in art and the world beyond.
“When you look at art history I can’t base my own [work] on women painters. [I asked] how do I bring something that is not the [male] tradition to painting? I started using tools that you use to clean the house – squeegies, rugs, an iron. I used black paint, garbage cans, plates, cups. It was a comment about women and the arts. Instead of cleaning, I’m making it dirty.”
With Cabessa’s work, there is an interaction with each piece. A conversation between the artist and her canvas that the viewer can experience. Books, letters and personal objects make up the work that is in Anthropometry, and it’s as if each piece is an x-ray or impression from her life. “I wanted something real. I’m not creating an illusion. I’m creating an action and that action becomes the image,” says Cabessa.
Having left behind the paint brush years ago, her paintings are made literally by hand. “Yves Klein used models to paint and actually used them to create the painting. He was standing there with a suit and telling the women what to do. I took it another step using my own body and objects that I put on the surface. So I’m having a little discussion with Yves Klein. I’m doing something that is much more feminine. For me it’s translating a feeling, emotion and even an understanding.” Cabessa loves the challenge in creating each piece. “In my work I want to be challenged,” she says. “I’m challenging myself to create a different image.”
The works themselves are deeply personal and transformative – changing our perception of the materials as we take in the larger work. A nondescript book spine becomes an erotic allusion. Love letters take on the shape of landscapes. Open pages are formed into a sunset. “I like the transformation in art. Something you take and you touch it and it becomes something else,” says Cabessa. “Every image here has a different energy to it and I am the tool.”

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an•thro•pom•e•try (n.) the measurement of the size and proportions of the human body, esp. as an aid for comparative study in physical anthropology.

I love the use of the term “anthropometry” to describe the work of Miriam Cabessa. She is in good company with “Anthropometry Paintings” as the description Yves Klein used for his trademark blue body prints of women. The cool scientific implication is offset by the incongruous combination of “poetry” and “anthropology.”
Cabessa’s work has until recently has been created through performative gestures released across panel and canvas with sponges or rags that track the limits of her anatomy (the length of her arm, for instance). By supplanting brush with the “glove” of materials like rag or sponge and her own hand, the gesture and the mark are fluid, not mediated by the fickle brush. The charge of energy is not diffused as it passes from soul to canvas. The alchemy, however, happens with the dexterity she is able to exert as paint twists, traverses canvas. A field of gestures coalesces into a field of changing textures that deceive the eye in to seeing the texture of canvas transform in to that of wood or a series of marks accumulate in to a cityscape. LET ME BE CLEAR, these hallucinations draw from the mind of the viewer; Cabessa is not leading us down the primrose path of image making. There is NO purposeful illusionistic space. This is our own baggage.
Cabessa’s recent body of work takes us to, ironically, the other end of the spectrum. She has taken emotionally charged books, photos and other personal ephemera and pressed them in to canvases loaded with paint: Memory Paintings. The imprint more fossil than print, she uses objects that should be only reveal superficial contours. Conjuring the metaphorical heat of Dennis Oppenheim’s 1971 work, “Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn,” in which Oppenheim lets the contour of a book singe his chest, but allowing the alchemical processes of paint, the words — the pulsing blood, through the mystical summoning of the artist are also revealed, blisters / physical pain supplanted by content.

The resulting “image” appears to muscle the invisible energy / nostalgia of Dostoyevsky or love letters into the threads of the canvas. There is no illusionistic space created. The image is the failure or incompatibility of fusion of poetry and reality. To the artist the “void” created where two pages join is a beautiful pussy. Her interpretation is no more important than any other viewer, her subconscious completes a different artwork than mine does (or maybe not).

Whereas the dislocated windshield wiper gesture of the early body of work sweeps along the two dimensional axis, the “Memory Paintings” pierce or at least imply the piercing of the third dimension. This is not illusion, but a literal struggle to add an object to the surface. Motion vs. stasis are also polarizing yields of her two approaches. This is certainly not to say the book paintings are static. The halo of the image vibrates like a Rothko; but is as if her attempts to anchor object on canvas are futile, and the memory does not want to adhere, but float from the surface and retreat to the depths of the artist’s private interior. Pandora needs to be put back in her box.

Miriam Cabessa: subverting Nature/Culture dichotomy 

Miriam Cabessa chose to exhibit in Meta-Sex one of the most moving attractions borrowed from the neighboring museum of natural history — a showcase displaying errors of nature: a two-headed calf, a lamb with six legs, an egg within an egg, chicks with three and four legs, and other mutations — products of nature’s cruelest imagination. The clinical scientific language of the original labels was used as part of the work. By dislocating and transferring an item from a Nature museum to an Art museum the artist rendered a cynical, amusing and cruel shift, that undermined the validity of taxonomic categories as well as all other socially constructed categories. The representation of nature’s failure could be interpreted as corresponding to the conservative concept of the woman as the ‘other’, as inferior, lustful, and non-spiritual.

Simone de Beauvoir, a representative of the early phase of feminist discourse, described women as “prisoners of their womb”. She argued that in order to obtain liberty and equality women must first liberate themselves of bodily processes, especially those connected with childbirth, which she perceived as the root of their subjection to biology, of being a passive instrument of life. “Trapped by nature, the pregnant woman is plant and animal… a collection of sticky materials, an incubator, an egg…”. The miserable creatures in the glass cabinet of Miriam Cabessa’s work seemed like this “collection of sticky materials”. They, too, render embarrassment because of their anomaly.

One of the basic assumptions posed by the feminist discourse is that woman’s social presence is different from that of man. The traditional research of art history is paved with texts that stripped the body of its sexuality and removed its social and psychological context. In this process, the nakedness of the body, the erotic charge carried in its nudity, its sexual identity and its modes of presentation within a context of social discourse, were submerged and erased.

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