Reconstructing women

Navah Porat has painted hundreds of women in her life. Being a petite woman herself, she is fascinated with big ladies with enormous feet. She finds heavy women attractive. 

She artistically plays with their body parts to express their natural beauty and sexuality. She catches them in different situations and at different times of day. Porat often comes back in her mind to the same models or women she met while traveling as a photographer.

Porat is a painter, sculptor, photographer, master printer, graphic designer – and in the last decade, an accomplished curator. In the 1980s she worked at the Print Workshop at the Artist’s House in Tel Aviv, where she created her etchings, and worked as a graphic designer and art director for advertising companies. In 1988, she opened her own graphic design studio. Her art has been shown all over the world: in Israel, US, Canada, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Poland, Hungary and more. Her latest individual exhibition, “Beauty Unknown,” is on display in Tel Aviv’s Ben Ami Gallery until June 1. 

In her interview with the Magazine, Porat explains why her paintings became monochromatic during the last year, how COVID-19 affected her art. She also surprises me with her worldly upbringing – born in Italy, raised in Argentina and Israel, she speaks, among other languages, Polish (my native tongue). Her original name is actually Celina Aptekar.

“I am sorry I forgot some of my Polish,” Navah Porat begins the interview, before my first question.

I was born in 1947, at the refugee camp in Milan. My parents were originally from Poland and Polish was spoken at home. They had some family in Argentina, that’s how we came to Buenos Aires when I was a year-and-a-half.

I was 16. I came with my parents. I was an only child. I am Israeli 100%, besides my accent in Hebrew. I have a Spanish accent, but before it was more Polish. About 10 years ago I went to Poland, and it was the only place where I was not asked where I am from. In Israel, people often think that I am from Romania.

I felt like a tourist. My parents were from Warsaw, my real name is Celina Aptekar; Porat is my married name. But we have nothing to do with a pharmacy (this Navah says in Polish; Aptekar comes from the word apteka, a pharmacy).

I didn’t think it was important to my art. But I look for opportunities to speak Polish. It’s a pity to lose the language. I speak it, but I don’t write and read in Polish.

Yes, of course. 

That’s right.

I started painting still in Buenos Aires with a private teacher. It was common there. I started at a very early age, when I was five years old and I don’t know why, but I always liked to paint fat women. Even when a model was thin, I painted her as very fat. It was not something that came from my mind; it was intuitive. I made legs and feet very big. 

I enlarge my women’s feet and toes spontaneously. My desire is to build a broad and stable foundation for my women. And at the same time, I think it comes from my need to check the limits of deformation and still to keep the woman as a whole and beautiful, erotic and attractive feminine figure. I am not trying to make anything grotesque. I am always looking for the beauty in those feet and fat bodies.

No, only women. The pets, if they were in my paintings in the past, had a function of decoration in the frame. Now I am trying to be more minimalistic in my art expressions. All the animals – cats, birds – they have disappeared. Maybe they will appear again.

Maybe it started unconsciously, during the corona plague. We were at home; we were very close to each other. The noise from the outside world disappeared. I started to give the entire stage to the women. All the canvases were filled with only the women. I reduced all the other details. The canvases were cleaner. I think it was my expression of the limited life we had.

This was a conscious decision. I did it to express the loss of color in our lives. I was looking for the way to show it, and I decided to create in black and white. I used to create art in black and white, but with a different technique, when I was doing etchings. They are also monochromatic. Now I am working in acrylics and I am using ribbons. I stick them to my work. They are part of the structure of my paintings. The color is coming back very slowly, very recently.

All those women, models are in my memory, in my mind. Knowing the anatomy very well, I can deform them. But they are still women. I can deconstruct them and reconstruct them, again. 

 

Yes, you can say that. It is a kind of new aesthetics. I am letting myself do it with a lot of self-confidence.

No [laughs]. I don’t give them names. I often paint the same women for years, just in different techniques. Prints, etches, oil and acrylic. Sometimes they are facing the public, other times I paint them from the back; sometimes in flower pattern dresses, sometimes – in plain clothes, sometimes they are nude. They are the same women; I show them in different positions and situations.

Yes, I am very small. Often people ask me about it, and when I was doing my masters, I was trying to answer this question. My thesis was about the beauty of a fat lady. 

No, both of my parents were very thin. 

No. I just don’t think there is anything interesting in a thin body. Nothing.

Hundreds, hundreds…

Not really… Mostly there are women in my imagination and memories from my travels. I traveled a lot in South America and Africa. There were many fat beautiful women. I photographed them. So this is some kind of synthesis of my work from the workshops I was doing, the photos I took while traveling and all the other things I was doing all my life. 

No, it was quite professional. I was a graphic designer for many years, in my own studio. I was using many of my photos in my work. I traveled a lot with a big professional camera before everyone was taking photos with their cellular phones. I lost my interest in taking pictures when everyone became “a photographer.” Now I left it for painting.

This is actually a funny story. For over 30 years I was working in etchings. I had many shows and solo exhibitions and in one of them, the exhibition of my etchings in New York, the gallery asked me to present the same narrative, but in colors. So my naïve women started to be colorful and I started to put color in my life in 2008. 

Yes. After that show in 2008, I had another one in New York, in Chelsea, in 2010, and another one in 2014. That last one was all oil on canvas. My naïve art.

Fernando Botero. He also painted fat women (but his women had small feet.) I admire the beauty in his women. 

They are simply beautiful… and I saw something in common between his and my paintings: the possibility of showing the beauty of ladies, also of fat ones. Until seeing his women, it was unconscious in my work. 

Yes, that’s true. However, there are also naïve artists who had education. 

It was wonderful, and I could speak Polish! Also the Festival was fantastic. My paintings are different, but they gave them a lot of honor. Usually, when people hear of the naïve art, they think of the small towns, the countryside. My paintings are naïve, but not from the countryside. I call my art, the contemporary naïve art. 

Matisse I always admired! The colors in his art. I think you are right, I have been influenced by both of them. The Hawaiian women of Gauguin… 

My art is the synthesis of everything I saw during my travels, but also the history of art, I learned.

Another artist who influenced me was Friedensreich Hundertwasser. His use of gold especially inspired me. The use of gold paint was very common in the royal court paintings, as well as in the Christian icons. Some of my ladies are represented as icons, but... they are modern, sexy ladies on a gold background. I feel that the use of gold color elevates my ladies to the rank of royalty.

I have always been painting. Maybe the only break from it was the two years just after arriving in Israel. I had to prepare for my final high school exams, and it was extremely difficult. I did not know the language. Everything was new: the Bible, the Hebrew language and I had to read many things in Hebrew – it was very difficult. 

But after those couple of years, I went back to art. I studied at ‘Midrasha of Omanut’ (the College of Arts, in Ramat HaSharon) and graduated with a bachelor’s in art education. Later I studied at the multidisciplinary program at Tel Aviv University. I graduated from the Faculty of Arts with a master’s. In 2014 I completed my curatorial studies at the Faculty of Arts, Curatorial Studies. 

First of all aesthetics. This is my personal taste. Then the subject – choosing pieces of art that relate to each other. I was always very interested in showing art in the right way. I think I am very good at it. As part of my job, I am curator of exhibitions in collaboration with Jewish and Arab artists who graduated from academic institutions such as the Midrasha, Bezalel and Shenkar. I prepare exhibitions, I choose what I like, it’s my decision. I am also a board member of MUZA, Ra’anana Artists Union. 

I had my ideas for the expositions, but I had to hold myself back and listen to my curator Johanan Herson. He convinced me to have this exhibition as my retrospective. I was planning to show only my newest work. Especially because during the pandemic I was working all the time. But my curator came to my studio, saw my old paintings and etchings and said he must show the context of my fat women.

I was very excited about this exhibition. Ben Ami Gallery is very avant-garde, attached to a coffee house. It was also very important to me to find the right gallery, a place I would fall in love with. I didn’t want a “white box” – empty white walls. I was looking for a place that is alive, where people come every day, not just for the opening night.

Yes, this is because of the post-corona period. I wanted a place that is alive.