Fi Fa Fu

Yitzhak Marecha examines the image and its ways of changing, by combining political symbols, elements of science and technology, and fantastical motifs. He stretches the limits of the image and questions aspects of aggressiveness and delusion, by using mundane ready-made materials, including fragmented words and random letters, citations from the history of art, and a constant oscillation between two and three dimensions, and between various techniques: engraving, casting, painting, printmaking, and assemblage.

His vast artistic oeuvre from the last years shown in this present exhibition unravels its unique transformation and metamorphic processes. In the manner of Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaistic subversive gestures, Marecha detaches the images from their conventional context, turns them upside down, and reinterprets them in terms of meaning and form. He chooses collective visual items such as the map of Israel and the UZI rifle, which he dismantles and reassembles. The irony and menace as well as the playfulness and humor in his art, call upon us, the spectators, to reconsider the power of images. Arbitrary syllables such as Fi Fa Fu, animal figures, parts of machines – all of these make up an optional visual array which exposes modern consciousness not as one of unity but as one of split and multiplicity.

Marecha creates fictional landscapes, which undermine the foundations of the conventional visual game. They bring to the surface the sense and non-sense intrinsic to the manner in which the images function and acquire meaning. Hence they establish a sequence of both utopian and melancholic gestures, that at the heart of which lies a great sense of liberation.