Matan Mittwoch - by Ami Barak

In a powerful sign of the confidence that has been invested in this artist who is new to the gallery, Matan Mittwoch was handed the entire space. Two sequences of photos titled Blinds and Waves were spread over two floors. Mittwoch's favorite subject is the image in the postphotography era. His large-format prints confront viewers with a tempered but intriguing abstractionism. The choice of abstraction, however, simply reveals what's going on backstage in the image factory that Mittwoch illustrates so ingeniously. Using a digital camera with macro lens to shoot an iPad screen, he gives us pixels as big as a fist, full of chromatic power and light. The image that the camera has seized is then displayed on the same screen, saved as a screen shot and then printed large. Then he switches back and forth from portrait to landscape format, a well-known practice to those who know how to use the nomadic device. Once again the texture of the image, full of interlacing and intermeshing, creates hypnotic rasters. The Waves series is a dream of an online landscape. He models his sunrises and sunsets, so often captured by Dead Sea tourists, with the help of a tube of corrugated cardboard. The crepuscular horizon is thoroughly imbued with romanticism, and the radical displacement of the cliché is equally effective. Touch works differently demonstrating the breadth of his approaches. Aptly titled, it is a scan of a fingertip bone, blown up to several times its original size and run out on a linear 3D printer, giving it the texture of a fingerprint.

Translation, L-S Torgoff