Artist Hayal Pozanti is Redefining Landscape Painting

When Hayal Pozanti appears on the Zoom screen, she is in her studio. Three large canvases—brimming with colorful, amoeba-like shapes—sit far behind her, propped against the back wall like doors to another universe. It feels as though at any moment Pozanti could turn around and walk straight into one of them. Her figure would slowly disappear into a fog of pinks and blues, into a land without a horizon line. In this way, Pozanti’s work is both full of wonder and amazingly tactile. Her shapes are somehow microscopic and macroscopic, as if your eye cannot quite settle on a focal point. She uses an oil stick and blends everything with her fingers, daubing color solidly, emphatically across the canvas. And recently, Pozanti adapted her work to a new surface: Dior’s Lady Art Bag. While the size and medium may seem incongruous with her practice, the bag instead adds another dimension, providing an opportunity to explore the textures to which her paintings allude. 

Whitewall caught up with Pozanti to discuss this collaboration with Dior, as well as the new direction of her work. After many years studying glyphs and encryption, Pozanti is thinking more about nature and the embodied act of painting. She is filtering reality through her own subjectivity—and in doing so, letting us rethink how we relate to our landscape. 

WHITEWALL: Can you tell me a little bit about what you’re working on now?

HAYAL POZANTI: I was making work based off a shape system, and each shape had a correspondent letter and a number. And so I worked with the system for almost 10 years. I taught myself a visual language, which I did use to use for encryption, which I did used to use for hiding information that was revealed within the titles and so on. But currently, what I’m doing is I’m taking that visual language that I’ve taught myself and memorized and going out into the world and making sketches in nature. I’m looking at landscapes, trees, flowers, plants, mushrooms, and translating the world through that visual language that I’ve made up. The creation of language is subconscious, but it’s also a reflection of a very primal understanding of the world around us. 

When I go out into the world, I make these very small plein-air sketches using oil pastels. This tiny little sketch is my subjective experience of looking and wanting to share my awe and wonder at the natural world. But it’s also about wanting people to start considering what the nonhuman world brings to the table as well. So it is about conversations around conservation, ecology, and not fixing the world, but, you know, figuring out how to how to live with other beings, and not in the way that we’re doing right now. We’re destroying all other kinds of beings and ourselves. There is a collective destruction happening.  

“This tiny little sketch is my subjective experience of looking and wanting to share my awe and wonder at the natural world,”

Hayal Pozanti

WW: I’m interested in the idea of being prompted by the natural world, because so much about surrealism can be about being prompted by the subconscious and then applying it to the natural world. Is there kind of an inversion of that happening?

HP: That’s interesting. For a very long time, I thought about, for example, how the Internet is related to surrealism in a way, because it’s kind of like a dream-generating machine. My work was very much influenced by the hallucinatory effect of the Internet. And now I think the hallucination and the dream are coming from the natural world. And it is in conversation with surrealism in that aspect. But nature is surreal enough. It is very unreal in its own way. You don’t need to be on drugs to go out and be in wonder of how something is strange and beautiful at the same time. 

It’s such a wonderful thing to ask because I did think a lot about the Internet before as being hallucinatory. I’m trying to actively get away from it and get away from spending time in front of a screen. It is very much about being embodied and being physically present in the world, looking at a flower for four hours and painting it. These are all very, very conscious efforts of trying to get away from the Internet, from the screen. They weren’t made lightly. But also, at the same time, of course, there’s a draw and a pull that the natural world does have. It was like, “Whoa, can you believe how enormous it is?” It has been here longer than we have been, and it’s a witness to everything else around it. We’re just so insignificant and tiny. 

Hayal Pozanti Paints with All the Human Senses

WW: I was interested in the scale of your work, because it is quite large. And I wondered if the scale was about emphasizing the physicality of the way you move your body across the canvas?

HP: Absolutely. So initially the scale of my paintings was based off of the size of an iPhone screen. I wanted it to feel like a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids kind of situation. What does this technology feel like in relationship to my body? I was also painting big at Yale too, because I had the feeling of, you know, “I’m a five foot two, tiny little woman, why can’t I make giant paintings?” 

But I wanted to get away from the computer. I wanted to step away. And I wanted to be fully present in the world. I’m here. My body is here. Let’s paint with all our senses. You know how we are when we’re sitting in front of computers. Your body hunches, and being human is reduced to just eyes and maybe tiny little finger movements. But a human is so much more than that. I also started thinking a lot about artificial intelligence, what it means to have an artificial intelligence, and what it means to have a human intelligence. Because human intelligence and a human understanding of the world are very much about the senses. You know, we’re not data-processing machines. We understand the world very much through our five senses, and being physically present in the world, and being embodied. Moving around is part of that experience. And I wanted to live a life and to make art and be creative in a very embodied way. 

I’m on my feet all day long. I’m reaching. I’m moving around. And so the bigger the painting, the bigger the scale, the less I am in front of a screen or on my iPhone. I am being fully, humanly creative in some capacity, and especially because I’m using my fingers to paint. There’s a tactility. There’s a way that information is flowing from my mind to my fingers. It’s almost like a cave painter. And, of course, the world is big. It’s much bigger than us, it deserves to take up even more space in our in our lives. And I want the experience of the viewer to be one of being able to imagine themselves in that world. Like this is maybe a utopian version of where we could be living, or maybe taking this tiny, tiny, little plant or mushroom and then making it so much bigger, so that, you know, it’s not taking up an “insignificant” amount of space in our life, but it takes up the space that it deserves.

Hayal Pozanti Sees the Dior Lady Art Bag as a Traveling Exhibition

WW: It’s funny you say that because I was imagining you walking into one of the paintings behind you, in an Alice in Wonderland kind of way. In terms of then bringing the scale down to the Lady Dior bag, how did you approach the project? What was it like bringing those ideas or revising those ideas into the scale of the bag?

HP: I kind of imagined it as a traveling exhibition. I think the beauty of collaborating like this is that the paintings go out into the world in places where normally maybe people wouldn’t see them. Normally when a painting is acquired by a collector, it goes into a home or a museum or wherever, but still, it’s very limited in its reach. And a bag is everywhere. It can be at the club, the yoga studio, the grocery store. It allows my ideas to disperse in a different kind of way. 

In terms of the materiality of it, I wanted these ideas about sensuality and tactility to be a big part of what the bags were. The beadwork and handiwork were made by these incredible craftspeople. The way that they responded to the way that I painted with the beadwork and the stitching—it took my breath away. I didn’t tell them how to stitch the beads in that way. So there’s this kind of energetic, spiritual connection that I felt. 

“I think the beauty of collaborating like this is that the paintings go out into the world in places where normally maybe people wouldn’t see them,”

Hayal Pozanti

One of the bags has satin and bouclé on it. When you hold the bags themselves, you want to keep touching them. I had this vision, maybe because I’m such a tactile person, of somebody having this bag and treating it like a little pet. And then I wanted to incorporate something that had been inspiring for me. I go on a lot of hikes, so for the bottoms of the bags, so it doesn’t sit on the floor, we made Dior hiking pole bottoms. Then there are carabiners that put the straps into place, so it can be a cross-body as well. 

It was a very material experience. It allowed me to think about, you know, because the surface of a painting, I’m not doing much to the surface of the paintings these days, they’re pretty flat. 

WW: You are interested in language, and people often talk about fashion being a kind of language. What is your own relationship to fashion like?

HP: I am interested in clothing because of its sensual nature. I’m drawn to it, in its expressive nature. You can say a lot with clothing, without saying anything. Especially for a painter, clothing has such a rich history. Fashion tracks how people respond. And when you see someone on the street, or a clothing line that somebody has created with all these references in mind, they are telling you these coded messages. I find it fascinating, and I do put a lot of thought into what to wear on a daily basis. Not in the studio, though. [Laughs]

WW: I also wondered about the curves in your work. How do you think about the fluidity in your work?

HP: It’s a great question, because for a very long time, it was very rigid. It is definitely a reaction to the rigidity of constructed reality. I guess, out in the world, you don’t see as many hard angles, so I think it’s the nature of the subject matter. But I also do love exaggerating it. I like exaggerating the curve and the form because I’m also interested in the idea of giving a feeling of movement in the painting. 

WW: It also keeps you inside, in a way. I think of Rothko and his very blurred lines. The rest of the world disperses, and you’re just in it. I think it’s, at least in part, because there aren’t any hard lines. They’re very fuzzy. 

HP: I think about Rothko a lot, so it is so interesting that you said that. I love that you pointed out the kind of the fuzziness of his paintings. And because I paint with my fingers, and the way that I blend colors together, there’s not really a hard line around it. When photographers come to document the paintings, they’re kind of like, “Oh my god, the camera is having a really hard time because there is a hard edge.” I did this hard-edge type painting for a very long time, and, and I found it to be very kind of machine-like, or paint-by-numbers. It felt a little bit unnatural for me personally, to be so rigid in the way. So, let’s blur these lines a little bit and soften everything. And create a more cocoon-like environment.