-- From: Harold Pinter's Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth & Politics," 2005

In his works, Sharif Waked consistently explores and challenges the essence and boundaries of visual perception. Sight is fundamentally subjected to perspectival fixation and is founded on the body's location, on the senses, on multiplicity and constant change. Waked is well conscious of the forced aspect intrinsic to the truth of perspective when he confronts us with presences lurking in the depths of the visible.

The visual vigor of the works in this "mini-retrospective" is based on split fragments of temporally and linguistically removed iconographies – masterpieces by radical artists, the world of fashion, and printed, electronic and digital media. The images were shifted from their iconographic, cultural and geographic settings in order to tell a different story.

The exhibition spans paintings, digitally manipulated photographs, installation, and video – new works alongside ones previously featured. The latter, Melancholy, Jericho First, and the video piece Chic Point, are accompanied by books consisting of critical-theoretical texts by leading writers in the field of visual art.

Waked's works incorporate a deep yearning for beauty, an inclination toward fine playfulness, absurd and irony. They beckon us to surrender ourselves to enchantment, but just when we think that we have "grasped" a given image, it slips away and vanishes. The blurring lures us to draw near and away, to narrow our glance and linger, to reconsider, doubt and question. It is generally believed that processes of disintegration and reintegration inherently tend toward synthesis and visual harmony, in Waked's works they expose our gaze to a disturbing reality.

Waked challenges the equation "immoral = ugly" by placing harmony and beauty on the catwalk in the video piece Chic Point, thus pointing at the immoral with dejecting irony. In Man and Woman he outlines with fine, pastel-like, Pointillist style the decline of the human. The same applies to the white drippings against a saccharine-sweet pink background in Untitled, representing self-expression caught in the straitjacket of a disciplining structure.

Based on a hunting scene extracted from a mosaic floor, the reincarnation series Jericho First undergoes metamorphosis typified by aesthetic and parodic choices, transforming it from a demonstration of beastly nature through a "monstration" of human nature, to a red stain – an ornament – a scene of crime in and of itself according to the Eurocentric perception of Adolf Loos (who condemned the ornament as "primitive" and "inferior").

By employing the regulating principles of the digital language, Waked strips Van Gogh's self-portrait of the mystery engulfing it, transforming it into a decorative mutation which is no more than a collection of pixels. Van Gogh represents the artist who experiences the world through his senses, articulating it with expressive tools, as distinguished from the indifferent monochromatic pixels which take an approach of reflexive estrangement from the world. Van Gogh is pushed to the social margins, having deviated from the context of the method whereby man is reduced to an anonymous element stripped of all distinguishing qualities.

Waked, however, strives to expose cultural hybridity, and what looks like a recurring, empty, a-historical, universal decorative pattern, in effect alludes to modernist "pattern" paintings, Islamic ornaments, and weaving and needlework samplers. A closer look further elucidates the incoherence of the constituent elements, which include, inter alia, Arab calligraphy. The perception of space as grid-generating coordinates eliminates the Eurocentric perception of center. Poles brought together are also discernible in the installation Sunflower where Waked juxtaposes sunflower seed shells with avant-garde art. Each of these strategies examines the conditions of birth– a moment of destruction and creation; each leads us to a vibrating moment of origination and metamorphosis as well as to the abyss that lies between them.