Gabi Kricheli

4 Shades of Plastic – text by Avshalom Suliman
How to Name a Nose with No Body, Nobody Knows
One of the bitterest ironies of our time lies in the fissure between what most of us see on the surface of things, and the subterranean tissue which vibrates sub-strata underneath it all. This tissue, or fabric, is in many ways reality’s most rudimentary matter. This is the principal perception informing Gabi Kricheli’s new show at Givon Art Gallery, titled How to Name a Nose without a Body, Nobody Knows. The works deal with our perception of reality, which by and large is geared towards the two-dimensional digital image. Kricheli addresses this two-dimensionality by producing masterfully crafted three-dimensional objects. The show’s internal irony relies on the inherent tension between physical reality (‘You, the viewers, are invited to touch a real object’) and our flattened perception of reality-as-an-image (‘You can never touch reality as such). In the cleft between the concreteness of physical touch and our inability to comprehend reality through sight or seeing, stretches a blind spot vast as a field, whose grayness is echoed in the limited color palate deployed throughout the exhibition. A similar contradiction also characterizes our ability to quickly adopt new technologies to ourselves, while masking our basic lack of awareness of the truth lying beneath most objects, tools, and products we use. It is to this specific gap that the artist turns to, with his sleeves-rolled-up, ready to work.
Kricheli places next to one another works that belong to two different ‘departments’ well known from his past projects and exhibitions. Here he displays almost only works constructed and carved out of wood, and sculptured elements cast from life, made with liquid polyurethane. Some of the works combine these two fabrication techniques, but each preserves in its own way the ethics of low-tech manual work. As a sculptor working with a large variety of different materials, Kricheli shows the fabric of our reality to be a composite thing. He seems to be saying that our physical reality is really made up of chains of polymers, either natural or synthetic, that compose the majority of the objects we use. Tools, engineered food, drugs and medicines, decorative and art objects – everything, or nearly everything is composed of processed materials that are basically quite similar to one another. In conversation, Kricheli refers to this rudimentary material layer as ‘the grÜnd of Reality’ [as in the German term designating the first layer applied to a canvas before beginning to paint, A.S], the non-color of the rudimentary stratum. In his recent works, this grÜnd seeps through vis-a-vis the yellowish, crème-like pigmentation of his polyurethane casts.
If ‘everything is made out of plastic’ and this ground of reality binds pretty much everything in the world – what, then, hides behind all things? Well, more or less the same matter, an atom or two added or extracted from the molecular chain.
Sometimes a mattress is only a mattress. Sometimes it’s not
Kricheli is an artist who samples and combines, even when he is busy carving one of his wooden sculptures by hand. You may view the entire exhibition as a series of such sampling actions, whose physical proximity enables one to create common meaning for them. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a series of four casts made of bi-component polyurethane foam which clone with extreme precision a Kanken backpack, a Yoga mattress, an Apple MacBook, and a cauliflower. These objects are four indicators of the current bon ton, and by laconically placing them next to one another like Pop icons, the artist is winking an eye at the socio-economic milieu he himself belongs to. In the age supposedly predominated by this creative class, a MacBook, as a signifier of hi-technology (a synthetic brain) quite naturally finds its place next to cauliflower, designating here at once both an organic ‘brain’ and the hallmark of a specific culinary culture. Both are placed next to another version of the same MacBook, this time cast in resin mixed with powdered copper so it resembles something dug-out of the earth, or a quasi-Victorian, albeit funky, version of the ‘original’. The material mediation and form of placing of these sculptures stress the fact that they are offered to us as flattened images, or quotes without an immediate context which is, in fact, samples, not of ‘Reality’ but of a certain lifestyle, and of the fantasy concerning that style of living. The installation of Cold Burekas at a Yellow Gas Station1 uses the same principle of theme and variation but places the works amidst the forlorn reality of South Tel Aviv, which is evoked through these empty doughy delights as a monotonous landscape of malnutrition and gasoline fumes. These cast works look like a statement of defiance in the manner of “what you see is what you get.”