Slow on the draw

Roey Heifetz’s painfully honest drawings exhibit a strong feeling of intimacy with the characters’ inner thoughts and emotions, albeit with a somewhat caricatured bent.

By BARRY DAVIS
Roey Heifetz poses at her ‘Victoria’ exhibition in Jerusalem’s Beit Ticho. At right is the large portrait ‘Frau L.’ (photo credit: ELIE POSNER)
Roey Heifetz poses at her ‘Victoria’ exhibition in Jerusalem’s Beit Ticho. At right is the large portrait ‘Frau L.’
(photo credit: ELIE POSNER)
Roey Heifetz is clearly not shy about letting it all hang out. As you enter the display space of Beit Ticho in Jerusalem, the delightfully appointed downtown offshoot of the Israel Museum, you can’t miss the outsized offerings in the Berlin-based Israeli artist’s current show there, “Victoria,” which forms part of this year’s Traces VI: The Return of Paper / Reflections on Drawing biennale.
The images are powerful but, more than anything, you are struck – actually, almost bowled over – by the stark, almost painful honesty of the portrayals. Aging women are exhibited in all their wrinkled glory, and there is more than a smidgen of androgyny in there, too. The latter is fueled by thirtysomething Heifetz’s own gender transition.
One of the standout portraits in the show goes by the somewhat mysterious moniker of Frau L., which, in fact, received a previous airing as part of Heifetz’s “Confessions” exhibition, held at the St. Johannes Evangelist Church in Berlin in 2014. It is difficult not to be charmed by the subject of Frau L. It appears that the now 68-year-old German has led a checkered life. Like Heifetz, she, too, underwent sex reassignment surgery. However, unlike the Israeli, she subsequently regretted the physically, emotionally and socially transformative move and today remains cloistered in her home.
Heifetz typically chose to sketch Frau L.’s face in great detail. Nary a wrinkle or skin sag, it seems, has been missed, although the eyes suggest freshness and hint at enduring youthful exuberance, and there is a sense of almost defiant pride, or quiet confidence, in the woman’s gaze, which belies the fragility to be found elsewhere in the portrait. The long, neatly center-parted locks also seem to reference a girlish past, and Heifetz complements the monochrome sketch with a texturally ephemeral bright red garment, which both offsets the carefully structured visage and adds physical depth to the work.
Roey Heifetz's ‘On Her Knees’ (photo credit: ELIE POSNER)
Roey Heifetz's ‘On Her Knees’ (photo credit: ELIE POSNER)
“Part of this work is to address the topic of how we live with regret,” says Heifetz. “She has to live with the fact that she made the mistake on her own body. You look at yourself in the mirror, and you see the decision you made and the guilt over that. She very much blames herself. That greatly interested me – how we live with remorse.”
You can tell that Heifetz gets under her subjects’ skin before setting pencils and brushes to paper. Her output exudes a strong feeling of intimacy with the character’s inner thoughts and emotions, albeit with a somewhat caricatured bent.
The carefully assembled exteriors you see in Heifetz’s drawings are very much an extension of the internal emotional topography she previously discerns.
“My works are not realistic, they are very emotional,” says the artist. “I went into my studio and drew Frau L. – she didn’t come to see the work, because she hardly leaves the house.”
Heifetz says she got a lot out of the encounter with the German woman, and not just on a professional level. “She helped me offload a lot of my own fears about my gender, or non-gender. After meeting her, my work began to deal with these things.”
The preliminaries for “Confessions” and, thus, for “Victoria” included getting a street-level handle on what makes Heifetz’s subjects tick. That also left her with plenty of food for thought, and had a definitive impact on the way she went about her own business.
“When I began working on the [“Confessions”] exhibition, while I was the people, I started wearing dresses, and putting on makeup, in public,” Heifetz notes. It was very much a reciprocally beneficial process.
“I interviewed the people and, during that stage, I also told them my story. A sort of dialogue developed. It was really powerful. After a while I realized that, in fact, I was the one who was offering my story. I think that was the right way to go about it. And there was a healthy dialogue between us.”
The confessional process was, says Heifetz, a basic, human and nonreligious dynamic. “With priests it is a hierarchical thing. You go into the confessional and the priest, as it were, gives you a penalty or penance. But with this process, it was very simple. I firmly believe in a direct and simple approach. My works are also very direct and simple, in many ways. That’s their strength. What I feel is what I put down on the paper – my fears and apprehensions and all the rest.”
As you meander your way around the exhibition space, you constantly catch glimpses of other works. That is very much down to the sheer scale of the drawings, which run to over 3 meters in height, with some over 4 meters wide.  Interestingly, the logistics entailed in the dimensions of the exhibits meant that many of the drawings are diptychs or triptychs, simply because the paper rolls Heifetz is able to obtain come in a standard width of 1.5 meters. That has a telling effect on the physical and nonphysical composition of the exhibits, as the eye is engaged by the outlines of the expansive sheeting but also beckoned to the irregular gaps between them.
Most of the 15 works are predominantly pencil sketches, with additional substances – oil paints, water colors and other materials – which naturally produce contours and undefined shapes that add interest to the physical presence of the exhibits. Heifetz was a little perturbed by the evolving “distortions” the different coagulation processes of the varying materials brought to the viewing fray, but the unforeseen progression also imbues the end product with an intriguing configuration.
The unscheduled drying dynamics not only add new planes of visual reference, they also satisfy an artistic bent, as do the measurements of the paper sheeting.
“I like sculpture a lot,” says Heifetz. “You see the paper is draped on the floor and rolled up, and it sticks out. The sheets have a presence in this space. That’s the third dimension.”
Although the works generally convey a palpable sense of empathy from the creator, surprisingly Heifetz confesses to harboring ambivalent emotions about her subjects.
“I have a strong misogynist side to me,” she says. “That surprised me. I have this thing about the aging of women. I don’t want to see myself getting older as a woman.” Then again, the ravages of time, on the female of the species, glare out at you, and at Heifetz, wherever you turn. “I had to see how I deal with that, in the face of my works in the studio. What I saw was a reflection of myself and of the characters.”
Heifetz researched the project incessantly, subtly probing the faces and demeanor of women past their first flush of bloom, on a daily basis. “I saw people from all socioeconomic strata, and older women who had something captivating about them. There is something about them that is very nurtured and crafted. I really appreciate that.”
She was also drawn to the imbalance between the women’s appearance and the perceived inner machinations. “When women reach a certain age, there is something inside them that breaks down,” the artist muses. “There is a certain tension between the inside and outside. I found that riveting, both because of my own fears and also because of the sheer physicality of the thing.”
That field research provided valuable raw material for the works that eventually made it to “Victoria.” “I took all those things with me into the studio, and I interpreted them with own tools – my sketching implements.”
Heifetz is no shirker either. “I drew and I drew, seven or eight hours at a time in the studio, up on a ladder,” she says. “I put a lot into this.”
There was certainly a lot of detail to be portrayed, by dint of Heifetz’s fascination with “lived in” faces. The hefty sketches allow the observer to scrutinize each and every line applied by the artist, and it looks like Heifetz was determined to get them all in.
That was fired not only by her almost obsessive interest in the corporeal pockmarks etched over the years, but also by her enchantment with detailed illustrative representation of yore. “I have a fetish for anatomy books from the 19th century, in which they’d strip the body down to the muscles and show them in minute detail. I don’t do that from a scientific point of view. I do that in an effort to get close to the person themselves. The gaze of these people is very intimate. They don’t evoke a sense of fear, which you can get from those anatomy illustrations.”
All artists dig into their own baggage, but you get the sense that Heifetz goes deeper than most and also constantly wears her heart on her sleeve. What you see in the exhibition spaces at Beit Ticho is what you get from Heifetz the person, with all her fears, personal and professional deliberations, travails and joys.
There is also a sense of unfettered endeavor. “I never really learned to draw, on a formal basis,” she declares. “I took one course [at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design] but it certainly wasn’t adequate.” Lack of official training notwithstanding, Heifetz has thrown herself into the discipline, body and soul. “For some people, drawing is just another skill they use. For me it is the be-all and end-all. I have devoted years to drawing and, for me, that’s my sole artistic language. There aren’t many who only do that.”
The line of creative attack, says Heifetz, is also facilitated by the fact that she has been living and working in foreign climes for the past four-and-a-half years. “I think living in Berlin frees me from a lot of hang-ups. Here [in Israel] I was always apologizing for producing drawings.
My works are not at all characteristic of Israeli visibility. Here, I was always a bit of an outsider. It was not considered to be acceptable to labor at your work, or to be really into the actual material. But I fought against that, and I eventually achieved my place and got the respect I wanted for my way of working.”
That came at a price. “I put so much into fighting against opposition to my approach that, when I got to Berlin, I found I didn’t have to devote any effort to that. In Berlin there is a long tradition of drawing. That isn’t to say that there are a lot of artists there who just draw, but at least it is a style they know and accept. There were people like Otto Dix and [George] Grosz,” says Heifetz.
The former was noted for his brutal depictions of the violence of war, and the latter was a leading member of the Dada movement. “Drawing has a place in the history of German art, so that was a better state of affairs for me,” she adds.
“Victoria” is clearly a labor of love. “I like to work hard, to draw hair and hands in great deal,” Heifetz states. “I enjoy the way the paper resists me and challenges me. In these drawings you see everything, including the places where I have deleted things. I believe in being honest.”
“Victoria” closes on March 23.