Unmani - Hugit Rubinstein


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But tell me: how did gold get to be the highest value? Because it is uncommon and useless and gleaming and gentle in its brilliance; it always gives itself. Only as an image of the highest virtue did gold get to be the highest value. The giver’s glance gleams like gold. A golden brilliance concludes peace between the moon and the sun. Uncommon is the highest virtue and useless, it is gleaming and gentle in its brilliance: a gift- giving virtue is the highest virtue.

Tell me, my brothers: what do we account bad and the worst of all? Is it not degeneration? And we always suspect degeneration where the bestowing soul is lacking.

--Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the Bestowing Virtue

Everything in Barbie's world is plastic; its smell hits my nose and spreads into the room as I unwrap her sleeping bags and caravan, knives and forks, shoes, accessories and house. Her body and yellow hair, the painted gleam in her eyes, sell the promise of a perfect world entombed in plastic.
It will stop at nothing, shape-shifting from the tiniest detailed fluffy cuties to bold and reliable objects of daily use. I gaze at plastic splendour, bright Lego blocks in all hues - always evenly intense and pure; simultaneously colour and matter gleaming at me, reassuring in their democratic sameness.

From the real to the virtual, plastic replaces everything. Only too soon its sheen gives way to dust and scratches, as hieroglyphic marks of a less important history and a creeping dullness replace its brilliance. It withdraws into the generality of objects surrounding us. It is matter that has lost its charm, unable to claim a special role; with a light of a match it succumbs to heat, melts and folds, collapsing in on itself, evaporating and recoiling into a cloud of black stinking smoke.
Neither alive nor dead: the unnamed sixth element - gifted with a smooth translucent surface - serves as a screen, reflecting time fractured by blinding white light.
Latex glamour of subculture, slick and cheap, its resilience lies in its submissiveness, its identity bound by a contract to serve. In its perfect fakeness its unblemished slippery surface is so appealing to touch, yet never touches back.
Thick or thin, left to be flat, each layer telling the same story; dug out grooves reveal a consistent uniform matter that lacks skin as it does flesh.
It couldn't be mine; the plastic seal was broken and disappointment sank deep into me. The hermetic seal was my expectation: I was to be the one to unwrap it, the first one to expose it to air and touch, to leave little fingerprints on its surface; personalize it with my oily, hidden skin smudges on its luminescent surface. It could only be personal if it were sealed, waiting to be mine, to stand out through my gaze and touch.

Hugit Unmani Rubinstein - 2009

My main body of work is of painting. I use photography and video as a means to distance myself from my paintings. These enable me to broaden my viewing points. In the process of photographing and editing I can challenge my ideas in different forms of representation thus by translating them I find I can often transcend them, and reach their fuller meaning.

I Paint mainly on Perspex and plastic sheets, as the translucent surface enables me to challenge their relationship to the space in which they are hanging. This is achieved by reflecting their surroundings on and off the surface of the painting and also by incorporating them as the painting is not hung traditionally on the wall, but rather frames the wall against which it leans or hangs.

The death of painting was a trigger to this kind of painting. My attempt was to make a clear coffin by executing the paintings on the reverse side of the Perspex sheet.

This process sealed the painting from the viewer, concealing its' tactile features leaving no clues to the process of its making. Manipulating the painting in this way made it more of a strange object removed and detached from its' own history, its' body thus reduced to a spectacle. The gesture of applying the paint and its' initial tactile potentials such as smell and texture are sealed beneath the Perspex now appearing only as a shade of a colour, merely a number in a paint catalogue. The image painted distanced by the reflections on the surface of the painting. This technique enhances the aspect of the artefact the painting as a mirror. Looking through the reflections at a painting, that is constantly being modified by its' surroundings due to its reflective nature, creates an awareness to the act of seeing. The viewer becomes aware of the choices made in order to see. Questions arise to what is and isn't part of the painting? And each gaze recreates the painting in a different way.

Hugit Unmani Rubinstein - 2007

A first studio visit: Hugit and I intensely leaf through catalogs, books and magazines; we’re especially interested in the anthropology of porno images, in the ways in which copulations and penetrations are represented in various cultures. It isn’t often that a studio visit allows you to ponder the practical likelihood of the kamasutra positions, or to ask questions about the way the Japanese do it as opposed to the way the Indians do it.

Its’ not often that you are called (in a professional framework) to carefully and meticulously decipher the anatomical structure of sexual organs, or to decode complex sexual positions: when is the woman on top, is there penetration involved, is he white and is she brown or vice versa, is this a representation of a relationship based on ownership and subservience, or a glimpse of enlightened, egalitarian relations, and so on and so forth. Read more

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