Red Sequence is a series of eighty-five cadmium red oil stick drawings on paper. The sheets of paper are of uniform size and consecutively hung on the wall in a tight five-by-seventeen grid. Most drawings in the series suggest a human figure presented in frontal view, mostly in sitting postures; others depict various abstract objects. Although each drawing is unique, the repetition of graphic flat-colored shapes creates a resemblance to a wallpaper pattern. 

During his three-month residency in Hanover, Germany, over the past summer, Tzion Abraham Hazan worked and lived in the Totenhaus (‘House of the Dead’ in German). The house is a single-room, detached unit, nicely renovated and surrounded by a garden. Until the early 1940’s, the house served as a mortuary for the nursing home down the street. 

While spending weeks in seclusion, unfamiliar with his surroundings, Hazan embraced the experience of alienation and chose not to resolve it by social practice or conceptual dialogue. Instead he aspired to push this experience of sterility to an extreme. He thus limited his process to working with oil-stick on a block of paper situated on the floor, using no external references and no preparatory sketches. Sitting on the floor, Hazan kept his eyes and hands fixed to the sheet of paper until a blot of color was formed. He repeated this act approximately 400 times over the summer. 

“I had recurring thoughts of the room’s past during my work process. Between the sheet and me, a motif of bodies with orifices emerged: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, gentiles and anuses. As I stroked the paper with my fingers, the act of washing bodies came to mind. The figures that appeared on the paper seemed to be sitting on the floor like me, with both feet level to their pelvis.”