Khen Shish cuts the gallery space with large scale painting, a partition made of nylon and paper, in an installation consisting of plates, collages and TV work.
Shish’s familiar symbolism, a poetical dictionary of painting-drawing constantly attempting to shield exposed nerves, to consolidate something ceaselessly gnawing from within, in a highly detailed repertoire that makes up a private universe.
The painted eye is turned over, becoming a boat, in an architecture of teardrops and masking tape.
Shish creats a “black religiosity”, a register of world-profaning acts: blackening, lowering, and uglification. The carriers of sanctity of the “decent”, “bourgeois” world are crushed with a brutal aesthetics: the body and the face, the decorative porcelain plates, and of course, the painting. With “piercing” aesthetics, Shish presents agitated performances of the “Theatre of Cruelty” Her face is mutilated, her eyes are gouged out; her body become skeletal, the plates are painted black, the boats sink, nooses dangle about, and only wings are left on the angels. The angel emblem is intertwined with the various work in a visual praxis.
Shish present “an uncanny, overwhelming typology of the power of horror”. These powers have been set free to wreak chaos in the world, to collide with and crash into “normative” material culture. Shish seeks redemption through “destruction”.
The position of the dissident subject generated by Shish formulates an eternal, permanent unraveling of the world. The overt cover offered by the exhibition is but a part of a mutilated objecthood, introduced to be charged with a range of new meanings. Thus the exhibition becomes a peek into a segment extracted from a whole universe, from an infinite lexicon.

Dr. Ktzia Alon

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