Ofer Lellouche's (b. 1947, Tunisia; immigrated to Israel in 1966; lives and works in Tel Aviv andParis) Hug swims in the space, floating; with one hand, outstretched for peace or impaledto the cross, at the top, and the head, which opens to the world like a conch, at the bottom.This sculpture may be regarded as a discussion of the ways in which we allow the world toopen "embassies" in our consciousness. We stretch our hands and eyes out like the twelvespies to the Promised Land. "Painting," writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Eye and Mind,"awakens and carries to its highest pitch a delirium which is vision itself, for to see is to haveat a distance; painting extends this strange possession to all aspects of Being." He goes onto say that "The painter, any painter, while he is painting, practices a magical theory of vision.He is obliged to admit that objects before him pass into him or else that [...] the mind goesout through the eyes to wander among objects."1 This is Lellouche's great achievement,that these words written about painting befit his sculptures. Indeed, this cabinet conjuresup a page in a sketchbook: here is a hand, here is a couple embracing, there is a head. It isa sculpture that imitates thought; a sculpture that begins to say something several times,like a writer who repeatedly writes the opening pages of a novel and finally brings a bookto the publisher with hundreds of first pages. It is a sculpture about the spirit that roams theworld, and about the body in which this world is organized from within.
Since the dawn of history, sculptures have been a part of an architectural ensemble.A free-standing sculpture, such as David, which stands in the center of the room andexpects viewers to surround it, is the exception rather than the rule. Suffice it to lookat Michelangelo's plans for the tomb of Pope Julius II to realize the extent to which thegreatest Renaissance sculptor perceived the sculpture as a part of the body, as a detailin a total array, as an architectural element. While modern art celebrated the freestandingsculpture, in recent decades sculpture has largely imploded into installation.Installation does not treat the sculpture as did the cathedral or the tombstone: it is not asupportive, highlighting array which forms a background for the sculpture, but rather anentity which "swallows" the sculpture into it. Lellouche's Hug evaded these two modesof representation: the cabinet is not a platform or a niche for the sculpture, but neitheris it an installation where the sculpture can be replaced, like a rook in a game of chessthat fell under the couch and was replaced by a Coca-Cola bottle cap, but maintained its"meaning" due to its function in the whole.
A cabinet is an autarchy. It is self-sufficient. Each element within it is an independentsculpture. The syntax of all the sculptures together does not determine their meaning:the odd materiality of the cabinet, comprising thin lines and thick casts; the images thatdissolve and fade into dull, muted masses of bronze; the large and near, juxtaposed withthe small and distant, negotiate with one another like neighbors in one building. A cabinetis a strange thing2: a Holy Ark; "coming out of the closet"; a coffin; the wardrobe leading toNarnia; the bookcase which is a library. A cabinet is a method of organization, analogous tothe human body, with up and down, façade and depths. Lellouche's cabinet houses figures,actions, stumps. It is not a body, but a sheet of organs without a body. It is a sculpture whichis a catalogue of sculptural actions: modeling the figure and destroying it; expanding inthe space by adding material and removing the superfluous by subtraction; smoothingand roughness. Perhaps this is why it resembles, as Merleau-Ponty wrote about painting, awandering in the world: the organization of the sculptures in the cabinet endows them withsimultaneity and frontality; thus, momentarily, they become a picture.
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