Roy Mordechay, 'Silent Partners': PLUS-ONE GALLERY (SOUTH)

Rising from the primordial chaos as it strives towards entropy, it penetrates ever up upwards, dreaming itself out of the numinous. The darkness reveals translucent figures painted as if with light itself: creatures that are lone, disembodied heads and fragmented body parts. They float in a vacuum, rotating on their own axis. They bob up, then down again. Some of these dual beings appear to be endowed with magical powers, flowing plasma-like from their sharp fingertips. Their eyes wander, stare or peer brightly towards an uncertain future. At times, dark, protruding spots spread across their melting faces, drifting from darkness into the light of consciousness like shreds of memory, the edges frayed. A square, an arm, a bird, a hat – or are they just coffee stains?

It's all in the eye of the beholder: depending on how you look at Roy Mordechay's work, there is constantly something new to discover in his enigmatic worlds. His art plays with our perception, transforming like puzzle pieces at different angles. Sometimes it is the format itself that reveals a new, deceptive perspective: grained wood inlaid with canvas. So, how does human perception work? This question takes on new meaning, particularly in our modern social media age. New information is constantly rushing through our feeds; we consume hundreds of images in a single day. They are like driftwood in a stream of impressions, with only a few remaining in our minds. Mordechay captures them on pastel-coloured backgrounds after sketching them digitally, their colour gradients reminiscent of digital aesthetics.

Just as our perception of the external environment is changeable, so too is our perspective of the internal. Fittingly, the title of Roy Mordechay's first solo exhibition at PLUS-ONE Gallery is "Silent Partners“, which describes all the components of a person that make up the totality of the self. Silent partners are the knowing parts of our egos that are invisible to the outside eye, but which nevertheless are part of the whole. Usually, these parts work together seamlessly, each one coming to the fore depending on the situation, before falling back into a sleepy twilight state. The Janus- faced figures in Mordechay's work are therefore "silent partners", as they peer into different directions while remaining united at their core. At times, they may reach for each other within their diffuse, wafting ego, hoping to whisper, only to never reach their partner. So, what do we see when our eyes are turned inwards behind closed lids?

Excerpt of the exhibition text written by Julia Stellmann, 2024