Jacob el hanani drawings of people

Horror vacui, esthetic kenophobia, obsessive, minute detail, exclusion of color: these are a few of the traits we have come to think of as Jacob El Hanani’s stock-in-trade. His career consists in a deployment of a very limited suite of resources, akin to Samuel Beckett’s single-adjective description of Bram van Velde’s paintings: “inexpressive.” Beckett did not mean they were devoid of expression.

He was simply stating the fact that in art there can be nothing to express that would not be merely anecdotal: random thoughts, feelings, personal problems. T.S. Eliot summed up this attitude up in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919):

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Beckett and Eliot explain what it is