Latant Heat 

Rishon Lezion Urbanite Gallery 2016

Curator: Effi Gen

The pieces presented in this show are meticulous and seem to belong to a semi-surrealistic world which is tethered and welded into the mother-land soil. The pieces are reminiscent of a physics lab notebook sketches: movements of shapes, patterns and signs seemingly familiar. But the nature of the composition represents a hermetically closed world, a world onto itself, which creates a mental geography of sub-spaces that stem from familiar images, but are not themselves familiar. The images are all pointing to a common ground; they stem from - and return to - a place, to the Israeli visualization, but everywhere and always are echoing an unpleasant dissonance. 

At the entrance to the gallery – a disturbance. A large 'insolent' cube, covered with synthetic grass – a green plastic material – is standing, or one may say blocking, the entrance, so that those who wish to enter must go around it. The cube has a peak hole about the size of a golf hole. The curious bystander takes a peak and suddenly finds himself or herself a witness to a film taken by aircraft cameras during an Israeli air force bombing of the six days war. In the background a familiar song plays softly – "on the path to the pools" sang by singer Chava Alberstein.  The volume is very low. Only those who stand very close can hear it. The peaking eye corresponds with the thrill that accompanies the peaking action but it is also the object that lower itself ankle high, to the grass, to the soil. It is referring to the well-known idiom "pushing up the daisies". In a moment of solitude we are bearing witness to air-plains falling, hits, eliminated targets, and the viewer is struck with the contrasting ideas of the lofty and the "down to earth". The observer who looks inside, to the subterraneal, is surprised to find him/herself looking from above, experiencing the birds view, the iron bird. The din of battle exists as an opposite to the quiet inside the hole, to the tranquility of the synthetic civilized grass. The noise marks, perhaps, the clutter of a civilization as it falls apart. The drawn images are searching for balance, alternatively, they are stuck in an undefined space, floating in the void. A disharmony is held side by side a place of peace. The bunker image indicates a possible catastrophe alongside protection. It is a sign for a paradox and a discord. The drawn image hangs in the void or, alternatively, is placed on a ground which its deepness or constancy rich in soil – are all consuming. So much so that the image loses its initial essence and becomes a closed, sealed, uncommunicative  capsule. An unstable and an insecure structure that lost its defenses. The closed structures are echoing formalistic modern shapes and so we may find shatters, terraces, houses and apartments, as well as stripes, circles and cubes. The sub-spaces invade underground as well, and indicate the physical as well as the non-physical. The works invite an investigative search after law systems, or infrastructures, upon which the tangible, well-known physical substance is placed, in a way which is well aware of the meta-physical in it. The search for a governing order within which the physical is organized according to laws of nature, logic and physics is only the tip of the iceberg, a whisper or a shadow of something bigger. An initiating energy , a murmur, a latent heat manifests as a secret hides in this ordered world. Fishbein's loaded Israeli visualization presents the beautiful and the ugly side by side with the intimidating and exciting, the fear of death side by side the militant culture and so on. There are manifestations of a place where movement exists only in a cognitive space, in a hypothetical path which, in practice, enables a conversation between graphical elements on the canvas.