FRAMED #64 Yonathan Avishai / Exhibition "On a Lake in a Room" Tanja Selzer

MUSIC – „Pianiste – a musical and theatrical portrait“ Yonathan Avishai

Most sought-after pianist in the international jazz scene and a regular companion of trumpeter Avishai and Bassist  Omer Avital, Yonathan Avishai made refinement his trademark. Elected by “Jazz Magazine” as the “Foreign Musician of the year” for 2019, Yonathan is a true storyteller, giving the impression that he composes silence and sculpts melodies. In 2019, he released two albums for the prestigious label ECM Records, “Joys and Solitudes” in trio and  “Playing the Room” with Avishai Cohen, confirming his taste for elegance and an extremely expressive minimalism.  

Based in France, pianist Yonathan Avishai is undoubtedly one of the most singular voices of his generation.  Whether through a concert, in a theater project, or in a workshop, this unique musician shares his passion for sound,  music, and its history. Yonatan’s original style revives the basic elements of jazz – swing, blues, and improvisation – in a very personal way. 

Inspired by artists such as Louis Armstrong, John Lewis, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Mark Rothko, Yonathan creates an emotional and colorful poetic world. He strives to deepen the dimension of his music, packing each note with a dramatic charge. It is through an economy of means and experimenting with cycles that this music takes form.  In his music, minimalism is a means of observing movement and attaining the essential, the poetry. 

ART EXHIBITION – „On a Lake in a Room“ Tanja Selzer

About Nature and Sex

Tanja Selzer is one of the few artists who, with powerful colours, have devoted themselves to voyeurism in the medium of painting. Her works are filled with the desire to glimpse sexual acts in nature, and with delicate textures and reflections in vegetation and incarnadine hues.

According to Tanja Selzer, pornographic films serve as her sources, but her vision is sumptuously focused upon the brilliance of carefully arranged colour and lighting known to us already in impressionistic works à la Manet and Monet in his “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” from the second half of the nineteenth century.

They indeed suggest as much, and yet Selzer’s works are not created “en plein air” and “sur le motif,” as the impressionists demanded. The dynamics of the bodies allude to the medium of film.

Often, the motifs are cropped like film stills or are frozen in movement. Less is made of the exhibition of poses, the acrobatics of the bodies, and the close-ups of genitals, and more of concentration and of silent contemplation.  Moreover, an important characteristic of pornography is not present. The actors do not provocatively seek the gaze of their onlookers, as the sex workers in the videos of the porno industry do. One famous example in art history exemplifies this distinction in the observational apparatus. Sex acts, represented in nature, have always been a powerful pictorial topos in painting. The frontal visual contact with Princess Leda in the painting “Leda and the Swan” (circa 1530) by Antonio da Correggio already led Louis of Orléans, the pious son of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, to feel so provoked that he cut her face out of the picture with a knife. Today, you can see the restored painting at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Since romanticism, a dark abyss was charted by the intrigues of the demonic woman, whose lust for sexual conquest was as destined to downfall as were her victims. But the aggression and confrontation are missing here.

Through the perceptible element of stillness, the works obtain an overabundance reminiscent of notions of union.

However, in the broadest sense, we see in Tanja Selzer’s works how pornography in film heralded from the outset a determined effort to forge a path, through the presentation of sex, to a mysterious essence in union with nature, which has become the basis for all that one is, and who one is. — Heike Fuhlbrügge