Ofer Lellouche

Isolation, burnt skin, disfigured faces. Ofer Lellouche depicts human beings in a way that is as mystical as it is radical. The output of the artist, who was born in Tunis in 1947 and has lived in Israel since 1966 after studying in Paris, is shaped by the experience of threat, persecution and extinction. Lellouche raises the oldest, universally valid question: "What is man?"
Against the backdrop of millennia of persecution, however, the question has a special place and explosive power in the history of Jewish thought - sadly, to this day. Lellouche also
approaches this theme in light of his own multicultural identity: with the “why” always being central. Be it in the Bible or in the Talmud: in Hebrew, this existential interrogative shares the same numerical value as the word for human being (Adam), thus referring to the existing close and eternally valid connection between these two words. The self-portrait and the human corpus are the most important themes of Lellouches' oeuvre. His bodies are naked and exposed as God created them. How or why they were disfigured remains a mystery in a Kafkaesque way. Lellouche does not offer any ways out, nor does he provide a possible iconography of liberation: his figures, who seem dark and threatening, greet us with blank stares. Despite their passivity, however, the mere presence of these bodies forces us with shocking power and unsurpassed intensity to confront the question of being.
Lellouche began experimenting with video art and painting in the 1970s and has explored a wide variety of media throughout his career, including drawing, sculpture, etching and
woodcut. Of essential importance to the process of creating his works is the unity of content and form: instead of imposing an abstract idea on any medium, the specific characteristics of, for example, a woodcut, a metal plate or a bronze casting consciously determine the final result of the work.



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