For the past two years, Fadida’s paintings have accompanied the regular column of the essayist Nissan Shor in the weekly supplement of the broadsheet Haaretz, which examines cultural and social phenomena from the personal viewpoint of one who grew up in Israel in the 1980s and 1990s. Fadida’s paintings, however, do not serve as an illustration of the text, nor do they bear any insightful or explanatory relationship to it as is usually the case with such juxtapositions. Rather, the paintings have an autonomous status, and bear no relationship whatsoever to the text; indeed, any connection between them is entirely coincidental and in the reader’s mind only.

Ostensibly, a wall painting and a drawing on paper are very different formats. While a wall painting is perceived as a forthright, outsized form of expression of a provocative and subversive nature akin to that of graffiti, artworks on paper are generally considered intimate, personal, and introverted. In fact, Fadida aims at the public space in both. Like a pashkevil (a poster hung in ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods to convey messages to the community, often decrying the evils of an idea or person), the writing is on the wall, but requires its own dictionary. In both types of painting he expresses – in his inimitable surrealist, encoded, absurd, and acerbic manner – an ironic, subversive, poignantly humorous critical statement about the human condition and prevailing order.

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