Keren Cytter

Critical text

Keren Cytter (b. 1977, Tel Aviv) says she discovered the joy of drawing when a blackout interrupted her work on a video. The remark not only reveals her constant, almost obsessive focus on the real world around her, but also her need to react to the visual stimuli that come from the means at her disposal. This constant need also culminates in drawings that act as snapshots of her everyday life. She herself speaks of ‘doodles’, which she makes while thinking of other things, suggesting an almost unconscious creative process: they are often details of interiors, fragments of a microcosm of her own, of which her body is certainly a part. She has recently used a felt-tip pen to capture everything that was reflected onto a sheet of mirrored paper—her face, her hand, plants... However, for the felt pen drawings she made at her parents’ home in Tel Aviv during the lockdown she adopted a technique that she uses repeatedly: that of collages consisting of twelve A4 sheets that break up and recompose her vision of a given subject. The same technique, with a distorted, faceted perspective also appears in the felt-tip drawings of her banknote series with images of communist leaders.

Text by Letizia Ragaglia