Payday

Yael Sloma’s exhibition Payday offers a contemporary interpretation of eschatological prophecies, Jewish as well as Christian, which are based on the belief in reward and punishment. The three featured works—The Last Judgment (woodcut), Danse Macabre (After Holbein) (linocut), and Four Horsemen (video/sound)—introduce a cause-and-effect relationship between the conduct of mankind (the sin) and the possible catastrophe that such behavior entails (the punishment).

Sloma’s works are akin to a graphic orchestration, in which technological means and digital platforms, theological themes, traditional techniques, and references from the history of art take part. The elongated cathedral windows have been replaced by the screens of digital devices, and the monumental frescoes and stained-glass windows—by monochromatic images depicting a disconcerting, poignant surreal vision. Sloma presents a society that endangers itself with excessive consumerism, fetishization, and insatiable hedonism. Bodily needs are met by couriers, and emotional needs are pacified by technology. Via horror, surrealism, macabre satire, and humor, the three works describe an indifferent, alienated society, oblivious of the existential threat inherent in its ways of living, a society marching mindlessly towards the abyss of the underworld.