2nd exhibition in the 19th Nidbach series: The future is not what it used to be

Itamar Toussia Cohen presents a series of paintings which deals with the evolutionary development of personalized image and symbol systems relative to the cultural field. The artist’s childhood soundtrack; early 90′s Israeli pop songs, is the starting point for many of the paintings.

Lyric fractions operate as sub-currents laying the paintings’ atmospheric foundations. The text provides the paintings’ emotional backdrop; through the text memory gains a-temporal status, as if extracted from a circular – rather than linear – time axis, appearing as a longing reflection upon a future memory. The words that are written/painted on the canvas seem to cite Islamic Calligraphy. The words turn into decorative patterns and often lose their immediate identification, turning into autonomous sign systems. The paintings are a product of work in an open field of operations in which different manners of representation are examined through varying painting styles.