The artist Hadas Hasid presents a minimalist diptych of “The Lifespan of a Pale Green Marker”, documenting the single motion of the marker as it leaves in mark on paper. The line it draws is consistent and uniform, curving into line after line, again and again, from the beginning and end of a green marker. Hasid’s action is restrained, perhaps even constrained. The area she allots herself is minimal in the extreme. The physical exertion and concentration required to execute the action repeatedly, along the length of large paper sheets, are at complete odds with the tightly controlled results. Think of the effort required to train the hand to perform a mechanical motion, to maintain tempo, to fight the natural inclination for free movement, to impose a forced and obsessive system on the physical and mental functions.

Alongside the diptych there are small drawings of the wage slip envelopes of the artists (1:1), in colored pencils. These are accurate and meticulous drawings of something inconsequential. The name of the company that produces these wage slips – “Michpal” – is replicated on the envelope hundreds of times in blue and red, and Hasid painstakingly draws them all.

Despite the obvious differences between the series of drawings and the diptych (size being only one variation), the accuracy, toil and delicate touch establish a rigid physical framework similar to the identical repetition of the hand movement. The outcome attests to the tremendous effort required to create something small – and the excessive investment needed to describe something meaningless.

And yet, a review of drawing depicting wage slips reveals that the labor intensive replication evolves from one drawing to the next, evident in the reduction of sketched details. The fastidious sketches seem at first glance like real wage slips, and the reduced details, stemming from the desire to erase or blur evidence of handwriting, only emphasizes these human tracks, confirming the replication through the disturbance done to it.

There exists great tension between a seemingly automatic action and traditional drawing techniques. These are two intrinsically paradoxical approaches; the friction they create always exposing the human “flaws” that make us incapable of living on “automatic pilot”. These flaws are what make us human. The minimized details provide some space to take a breath, making them exist in their own right.