5 texts

“5 texts” is a five-piece series that explores the threshold between legibility and illegibility. This tension runs through much of my artistic practice. It is not only a visual concern but also a deeply personal and philosophical one.

For this series, I selected texts that are close to my heart, each carrying a different emotional and intellectual resonance. Among them is a poem from my youth, still echoing with formative sentiment, a page from Pardes Rimonim, the sixteenth-century mystical treatise by Moshe Cordovero, and passages from Sefer Yetzirah, one of the earliest and most enigmatic works of Jewish mysticism. Each text serves both as an anchor and a departure point, familiar yet elusive.

I mounted the texts in a way that allows them to be perceived clearly from a distance. At first glance, they offer recognition, even comfort. But as the viewer steps closer, the letters begin to disintegrate, dissolve, or fragment. The words lose their stability. The closer one gets, the more the text evades. What initially appears accessible becomes opaque. This is not an accident. It is a deliberate choreography of distance and nearness.

This phenomenon reflects something I experience continually in my life. The act of drawing closer to language, to meaning, to memory often leads to rupture or loss. What promises intimacy can instead yield estrangement. The attempt to grasp, to see clearly, to understand, can end up unraveling both the object and the observer. It is a meditation on how knowledge, especially when pursued with intensity, can destabilize rather than ground us.

In that sense, this work is not only about text or mysticism. It is about the quiet violence of approaching something too closely. It is about how meaning withholds itself precisely at the moment we believe we are about to receive it.In this work, I took two layers, one simply a scan from the book and another, showing the same text but in a kind of “faux Hebrew font”. A font I created to be recognisable as Hebrew but illegible. None of the letters are truly Hebrew letters, but all of them look like they might be. As a result, we recognise the text as a familiar text, but fail at the attempt of actually reading it.