Pnina Granirer: a dancing line

The soft body versus the hard world: perhaps this is the human predicament. Vancouver-based artist Pnina Granirer has been exploring this dichotomy for the past six years. The works included in her exhibit, Synchronicity, mounted earlier this year at the Zack Gallery in Vancouver, evoke the complex relationships between humans and their contemporary settings. Her imagery features dancers and celebrates the inherent directness of their discipline.

Figure. Pnina Granirer. Leap (2005). Monoprint on paper, 40" х30". Photo by: Pnina Granirer

Although Granirer initially worked from photos she had taken of dance rehearsals, the final versions are active responses rather than copies. Her translation of the dynamic presence of dance does not rest simply in the imagery, but in the innovative presentation of the pieces. Each of her figures, whether on canvas, Mylar or paper, are energized. They leap, stretch, fall, collapse. The images' defining lines have been erased, etched, scratched, blurred and overlapped, reflecting the way the body carries the traces of life's (mis)adventures. Her marks are made with values from the most ephemeral chalk lines to light-denying black paint. Granirer is one of Canada's veteran artists, classically trained in Israel and Europe, with over 40 years of work behind her, including many international exhibitions. Her interest in the human figure has been evident throughout her career, but in the past six years she has focused on the figure exclusively.

“The purpose of these works is to express the synchronicity of these two basic, non-verbal human activities, dance and visual art,” she writes in her artist's statement.

Even the viewer's own physical movement affects how one sees these works. Their presentation includes images of dancers in Plexiglass boxes, which contain a flat drawing in the back of the box and another on a sheet of clear Mylar bulging toward the viewer. As one moves past the box, both figures shift in a simple but animated tableau. Other drawings of dancers revel on clear Mylar sheets suspended from the ceiling, removed from the rigidity of walls and frames.

In an earlier solo exhibit at the Yukon Arts Centre, Granirer had installed the clear Mylar drawings against the gallery walls. One was set forward across a corner, giving the artist the idea of hanging them freely in the gallery space. Not only do they shift and interact with each other as the viewer moves, but ambient lighting casts an entire troupe of shadows on the walls around them.

Figure. Pnina Granirer. Apex (2005). Mixed media on canvas, 36" х 48". Photo by: Pnina Granirer

During this year's Chutzpah! Festival in early March, graduating students from Vancouver's Arts Umbrella dance program added a live, performative element by dancing in and around the drawings. They improvised in direct response to the images. Granirer described this as an “interaction between the live body and the imaginary one.”

In Granirer's paintings on canvas, figures are often set against hard-edged lines that contrast with a sense of flesh and warmth. If the figures on Mylar seem free, the paintings remind us that there is always a context, including boundaries that can be rigid and unforgiving. A liquid-blue couple embrace in a dark rectangle, which is in turn contained within a triangle where another couple dances. The woman's hand reaches beyond a restricting line to an area of greater illumination. Two figures fold together in a quiet piece called Wordless Moment. Even here there is a pulse, perhaps of shared grief or imminent awakening.

Sometimes Granirer includes patterned foil as a border of unreadable glyphs, or the shiny side of a compact disc embedded in the painting medium, the hard, bright edge of technology making the human figures more vulnerable.

Lorissa Sengara writes in the summer 2005 issue of Canadian Art, “Over the last 100 years, figurative art hasn't exactly been a hot category in art criticism or history.” Contemporary art often acknowledges the body indirectly through the scale of installations or through traces of the physical (including the representation of the body in photography and video) and the semiotic redolence of materials. Drawing or painting the figure has become distinctly unfashionable.

Fortunately, Granirer's dignity and vision continue the grand traditions of figurative art. This tradition is not stagnant, but is a framework within which to adapt and respond to our time and its challenges. As Granirer points out, the soft bodies that house us are increasingly affected by industry and technology, yet they remain the constant vehicle of our expression.