His aspiration is to get to the point where he will paint the human figure itself, but the present stage is
still too inhibited to allow him to grapple with this frontally.
Each painting begins with a coat of white oil paint, a kind of nether light that is covered with chaotic
layers of colored brush-strokes and additional levels of hues of gray and black. During the preparation
of this material substratum there exists no image as yet, nor any composition or clear structure.
This is an intuitive process which is not planned in advance. The images and the markings of the space
that encompasses them are incised with a knife and exposed from out of the layers of paint,
which have mixed and blended into a grayish screening.
but an inner necessity. Insome of them, brighter and more diversified lower layers have been scratched
out and exposed, to reveal a wealth of sensitive processings and refined textures. The soft textures moderate the harshness and alienation, and as a consequence of the technique of scratching-out,
the contour lines are not sharp and resolute. These are quivering lines, which touch and do not touch,
and accord the painting a more living and human character.
Meir Natif refrains from perfect and polished finishes, and prefers the manual and "dirty" touch and the unfinished margins, in order to preserve a balance between his inclination to a clean and symmetrical aesthetics, on the one hand, and a warm, breathing, human expression, on the other.
His painting always sways between poles: between soft and hard, between feeling and organization, between warmth and alienation and between poetics and existentialism. The tension between light
and darkness is a further contrary, and connects with the dialectics of life and death, which runs
through his works as a leitmotif.
At times the presence of these human chairs is strong, solid, illuminated and optimistic. A presence of life. At times, though, this is a hovering and tenuous presence, a moment before cessation and vanishing.
In one painting there appears a single chair imprisoned in a blocked space and pressed to the bottom
of the page, and in other instance the chair floats alone at the edge of the universe.
In one work a number of chairs appear in single file, recalling an endless caravan of nomads, and in another there is a group of chairs that have banded together, designating a possibility of escaping
from loneliness.
According to Meir Natif, his contemplation of human existence ranges between a persistent quest
for the beautiful and a sober perception of the tragic. This heavy pendulum is what motivates the
subtle tensions that are woven in his paintings.
