"Horizontal Line Nof"

Born in Morocco, raised in Israel, Jacob El Hanani came to New York in 1974. Since 1979, he has devoted himself exclusively to the medium of ink on paper. His dense, detailed drawings, composed of obsessively repeated tiny elements, reflect the process-oriented ethos of the 1970s, yet also derive from his practice of micrography, an ancient Jewish scribal tradition in which tiny letters are repeated to form a larger image. In the present drawing the accumulation of small, carefully drawn horizontal lines resolves into a larger atmospheric effect suggesting a landscape. (Hence the title in which Nof is the Hebrew for landscape.)