Yuval Kanev studied painting at the Avni Institute of Tel Aviv, in a time of thorough interaction with the vanguard currents of Paris and particularly with lyrical abstraction. Notwithstanding his close ties with his teachers who noticed his exceptional talent, he interrupted his formal studies and made some intensive explorations in varied European museums, where he absorbed strong heterogenic influences. Following his return to Tel Aviv, he earned his living by various jobs, mounted his first solo exhibition in 1979, and silently groped his way within the closed doors of his studio, uninvolved with foremost artistic ideologies and leading kinds of artistic rhetoric.

Kanev's mature creation, including the rare kind of personal handwriting and the mass of expressive presence, commonly appeal to spectators with distinctive pictorial sensitivity, who are not necessarily aware of his prolonged interest in basic structures within the varied spheres of art, like the D major scale, the iambic weight, or the format of the simple sentence according to the English grammar – which, indeed, have no appropriate counterparts within the sphere of painting.

In spite of, or perhaps because of his attraction to subjects related to composition – see for instance his book, 'Pictures and Patterns' 1986 – he admittedly accepts the inferior condition of the painter, who has to create within anonymous theoretical surroundings, since he lacks the basic conceptual tools compared to the composer, the poet and the writer. In such primitive situation, as he says, he sometimes plays with crude pictorial elements like patches of color, which might give him silent hints of musical or poetical atmosphere.  

Most of his time he spends his studio without a word spoken, stirring a mix of paints, grounding a sheet of canvas, rubbing out a sheet of canvas, cleaning a brush, moving a picture from one corner to another, or painting…

Dr. Kochava Fattal Binyamin.