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simultaneously other than and one of them , has chosen the connection rather than the separation . Although the artist and his family do not exchange glances , they are clearly occupied with observation . The eldest daughter on the right looks down at the string of pearls in the hands of her father , who also looks down at it . The eyes of the wife and the girl on the left are focused at different points outside of the painting . Only the dog , seated at the wife's feet , returns our gaze and thus confirms the gaze of the one who painted it . The doggie whose upper body bursts forth from the painting's right-hand corner is in the midst of walking forward , maybe towards its mother . Did Shamir mean to express with this forward movement his yearning for sensual tendency ? For an existence in transit ? He may have sought to compare this ever-changeable transit with an investigation that is lit anew with each and every creation , an investigation that has no solution , unless the appearance of the visible on canvas is a solution . And the visible itself , is it not an existence that no longer depends on anything but the viewer ? One can hardly avoid comparing the dog at the wife's feet with another dog—the one standing at the mistress' feet in Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage , 1434 , as an expression of faithfulness , and especially as an expression of Shamir's commitment to study from the Old Masters . This Credo of his also appears in what may be interpreted by its subject matter as his tribute to Velázquez' Las Maninas ( The Maids of Honor ) , 1656 , a painting once known as "The Family , " expressing the Spanish artist's pride at his inclusion among the royal hierarchy . It is curious to mention here another Shamir painting , Each One Is Devoured by His Dogs , 2006 . This painting is based on the story in Ovid's Metamorphoses about Actaeon who was punished by Diana and the nymphs for stumbling upon them as they bathed naked , and turned into a stag , torn apart by his very own pack of hound dogs . This painting by Shamir is composed of a copy of Titian's celebrated The Death of Actaeon , ca . 1559-75 ( Titian's style , by the way , is influenced by Michelangelo's late work ) , in which the hounds , following their senses , tear apart the hunter whose sole transgression was having followed his impulse ; a further motif in this painting by Shamir is a mirror reflecting Shamir standing by an easel out in the field , and the dog at his feet gazing at him . For Shamir , painting is an immediate and necessary tool for relating to reality , just like following the tradition of painting as a model of what is beautiful and how to paint . To paint despite of , and not because of . In order to clarify this point , I observe Family Portrait again : Shamir looks down to his left hand—the hand that does not paint . If we draw a horizontal line through it , it will cross the vertical line dividing the painting at its center . For him , painting means writing with his left hand . Shamir has mentioned to me in the past his absence of a born talent to paint . Painting for him is thus an act requiring Sisyphic toil . Shamir has chosen to paint despite his Achilles heel . This choice may have granted him the freedom to set himself challenges . The insistence to paint characterizes his development as an artist . Insistence to paint while observing the visible world . The visual phenomena as a concrete and relevant source of knowledge . Shamir's choice of the string of pearls , that is , of the "beautiful , " work as an esthetic , eye-pleasing organism , is made through his visual opening to the world . The pearl oyster , as an organism that opens outwards in order to absorb , assimilate and create the pearl , could serve as a parable for Shamir's world view . This view becomes one of the central motifs in the present work : the commitment to life , to Eros , in contrast to Achilles who chose death , Thanatos . This is an attempt to reverse values that appears already in his earlier works . Forcing ideology onto reality as an obstructing , life-destroying concept appears in Shamir's earlier paintings : The Draw at Masada ( Elazar ben Yair and the Angel Announcing to Mary ) , 1990 : Masada as an extreme event of contrasts and separations , of carrying ideologies unto Thanatos , death . The triptych John the Baptist , 1991 , also relates in its three parts to severing the head from the body as an expression of a separating binary perception : one panel shows the severed head of John the Baptist ( an image following Caravaggio ); the second panel appropriates Marcel Duchamp's work— Fresh Widow ( The Guillotine ) , which is in fact a reproduction of a sealed window ; and the third panel has a sketch of a television made with a fixer on photographic paper in a darkroom—in blindness . To return to Shamir's present painting : it is difficult to ignore the meaning of the choice being made before three women . One immediately thinks of the Judgment of Paris , the cause of the Trojan war—where Achilles found his death from the arrow shot by Paris , which hit his heel . The jealous goddesses who participated in this beauty contest did not ask Paris to observe and make a decision , but bribed him . Shamir repeatedly suggests that jealousy is blindness , is death . Continuing to paint through observation means delaying the possibility of death . Maybe this is the redemption that painting offers Elie Shamir . The act of painting as a concrete and allegorical place of freedom and dream . February 2009 ( Translated by Tamar Fox )
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