Mar Lavan– Dani Back

A dressed-up animal is searching for identity. Its unrecognizable shape attests to the psychological processes it is going through, trying to assimilate in the human world. The amorphous transformation eventually leads to undefined assimilation and disappearance.

The transformation is characterized by wearing a simple, neutral mask concurrently representing presence and absence. The face has lost its unique, characteristic features, becoming a basic mold for a mask.

Its emptiness and simplicity hold the secret. This dark presence flickers in the emptied face. A gigantic head fills the canvas almost entirely.

The insult and shame of hiding absorbed by this creature throughout its transformation process makes her face white.

There are three openings in this mask: two holes for the eyes and one for the mouth. In some of the paintings the mouth creates an expression of amazement, while in others a small smile is formed. This frozen smile seems to almost be drawn on the face.

Underneath it lays a denied presence: animal power. The voiceless mask expresses absolute pain. The mask, usually serving as a shield from a strange and intimidating world or attempting to conceal one's intentions, appears here as a stage in an assimilation process. The power of the mask lies in changing and replacing the personality behind the visible figure.

In this instance, the mask represents a need of protection and concealment, of displaying a certain identity and of a transformation of form.

It represents its wearer's sub-conscious and wishes.

In the transformation processes the animal wears a mask of a girl allowing it to assimilate in human society and fulfill the ideal image it aspires to, but the poking tip of a tail, characterized as hair, attests to its inability to break free from its past on the one hand and its inability to totally immerge itself in a new, strange and unfamiliar world on the other. The eyes defining its identity remained as a typical character of the original animal.

Mar Lavan is a "persona" obsessing about its own identity. According to Jung, the "persona" is the character every person takes on in order to function in society. It is an exterior image, the representative "façade" a person turns towards society ¹ . The persona gives its wearer a new character, differing from the one used on a daily basis. In extreme cases it can completely erase the personality.

 Throughout the character's transformation there is a gradual moderation in the level of animal expressiveness, but it seems that an interaction with its environment was still not established and it is still in a point where it feels estranged. The mask is in an intermediate position bridging truth and fiction, reality and fantasy, the natural and the super-natural, life and death. When the surrounding world became threatening, creating severe existential angst in the animal, it internalized its true self and externalized the "false self" (the mask). As a result it was cut off from the world and lost touch with it, and as a result its true self was completely emptied.

The assimilation combined with hiding eventually overcame its ability to change. The risk the animal took dissolved with the animal and materialized. The search has lead to disappearance. The physical entity was gone, leaving behind its implied presence, its spirit.

Notes:

1. Jung, C.G., The Essays on Analytical Psychology, Meridian Books, New York, 1956.