Guy Yanai’s Painting Practice Was Made for This Moment | Artsy

Guy Yanai checked into a Club Med in the French Alps, and quickly discovered it was not what he expected. The hotel was an outdated ski lodge without any snow. “It was this horrible vacation,” the fortysomething artist said of his family trip there, a few years back. Still, he wanted to paint the drab resort—maybe so he could get a do-over of his vacation, this time in colorful and glorious surroundings.

But once Yanai flew home to Tel Aviv, none of his snapshots were quite right. He kept searching for a good image until, finally, he found one on a completely generic source: TripAdvisor. “They had all these pictures, so I combined a few and I made this painting,” Yanai said of Club Med Serre Chevalier (2017), the first artwork for which he ever used the popular tourism website. “I really like this painting.”

After finding decent TripAdvisor photos of that Club Med, Yanai transferred a remixed version to a large-scale canvas with his usual Mediterranean palette of bright greens, pinks, and aquas. His signature brushstrokes—long strips that leave behind sculptural traces of excess paint, like grout between mosaic tiles or the lines of a woven textile—outline the hotel buildings, mountains, and cloudless sky.