In Shani Ben Haim, Rubin extends her taxonomy of the feminine gaze into a register of confrontational intimacy. Belonging to the cycle "The Apple Doesn't Fall," the portrait dispenses with anecdote to isolate the sitter within a shallow, almost sacral pictorial space, where facture and flesh become coextensive. Rubin's brushwork - now dense and impasto, now thinned to a breath - renders the encounter as a phenomenological event rather than a mere resemblance: to look at Shani is to be implicated in the slow violence of being seen. The apple functions as a destabilising index of desire and knowledge, a fruit simultaneously offered and forbidden, collapsing the biblical and the biographical into a single charged sign. The result is a portrait that refuses passivity, positing the female subject as an agent of the gaze rather than its object - watchful, self-possessed, irreducibly present.
