Listen To Your Eyes - Photography





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Michael Maytal's photographs recast the myth of Narcissus as a circuit of more formidable misunderstandings than the mere confusion of the self with its reflected image. Narcissus believes his mirrored form to be someone else's. He falls in love with himself while imagining that he is someone else.

What Maytal's figures find in mirrors may also be themselves, but his pictures present this encounter in ways that literally reflect the dark transactions of the self with its shifting perceptions of its image. Whether what looks back from the mirror is the picture of a wish or an apprehension, or something else altogether, Maytal leaves for the viewer to determine.

- Gary Indiana, from The Mirror's Lament, September 2004



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Michael Maytal creates a world in which questions are asked and answers are given simultaneously. He photographs a reality in which one person's image may be another's—and still someone else's might be either of theirs. Maytal has a need to defy and provoke. He also has need to untangle the relationships of people to each other and to objects, as well as to the familiar norm. Maytal's attitude toward art differs, substantially, from the constant aspiration of most artists. He has no wish to be associated with a familiar and conventional trend or genre. He relates not to an artistic fashion but to his own, human, nature. What he wants to share, and liberally so, is a very personal view-and a very individual wit.

Maytal has a personal vision—an ongoing dream that is at times deceptively naive—to examine and diagnose Man's responses to what he finds enigmatic in Woman. He builds a visually absurd world in which he captures the complex interactions of the sexes, while also engaging the viewer in questions about basic existence.

- Doron Polak, Projective Artist Museum, from Michael Maytal: Auteur of the Visually Absurd, November 2004


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