The deceptive spaces in Roy Yariv's multi-disciplinarian work serve as a milestone in relation to op art and abstract painting since they seem to exceed the realms of the two and three- dimensional work customary the world of art, and move towards the multi –dimensional. Yariv's conceptual premise is visual art's need to be realized in the general space of existence, enveloping the observer in such a way that he lives inside art, and not just beside it.

 

Like the post-pop Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami, known for his trans- genre collaborations with the fashion brand Louis Vuitton, Yariv also prefers to view his work as an all- encompassing visual language, assimilating and taking root in everyday life.

 

It seems as if this is a natural progression for Yariv’s painterly position, made of meticulously executed systems of lines and patches of color, which seem to flicker in infinite movement in every direction, never static and never contained by a single glance.

 

The pictorial images do not appear in a symmetric pattern repeating itself like a clear homogenous pattern; rather pull in all directions, creating new arenas of occurrence, which seems to be existing in an ongoing formation.

Over the past few years, Yariv has focused on developing a stylistic handwriting, which explores the corner stone's of the visual language of lines and patches of color.

 

The thin and thick lines and the circular patches of color Yariv has been drawing over a long period of time, layer upon layer, aggregate into countless points of view, expanding and contracting like a camera's shutter, zooming in and out in front of the object of observation.

 

The pictorial or sculptural image might be perceived as a close up of part of a larger piece, a detail from a sphere exceeding the boundaries of the surface, but can also be perceived as the matrix itself, or as a indicator of the infinite net, which to begin with, has no beginning and no end.

 

As opposed to abstract artists or op art artists who began establishing their style in the 50s and 60s of the twentieth century, while emphasizing the illusionary dimension of the pictorial image on the flat surface by means of geometric compositions that do not exist in the "real" world, rather, as a system of painted symbols (unlike landscapes, portraits or a vase with flowers, for example, which imitate an object from "reality"), Yariv throws the observer into a multi- dimensional space and activates it like a performer distributing the pictorial image in all directions.

 

This deviation from the two dimensional world of art and the closed exhibition space can be perceived  in the context Deleuze and Guattari's clearly postmodern rhizome theory, who proffered the image of the root spreading asymmetrically in all directions, while canceling the historical, hierarchic model (the arborescent model) of one thing stemming from another. The rhizome branches out simultaneously in every direction, similarly to cyber- internet- space, shattering dichotomies in favor of multi-dimensionality, both rather than either or.

Hence, Yariv's paintings could be a sculpture, a shirt, a pillow or a beach towel, not as a byproduct reproducing the artistic original, rather as the artwork itself.

 

Continuing the rhizomian spirit, Yariv's pictorial imagery can be perceived as figurative as well as abstract. The series of paintings "Colony" is not just a system of circles and patches of color; rather, it can also bring to mind a colony of germs, microbial cultures, blood cells or plasma under the microscope.

These could be symbolic images representing individuals gathering within given boundaries, leaving the micro in favor of the macro, towards other populations, which share limited spaces, and reciprocal relationships.

 

In the series of paintings "Meeting Points", Yariv refers to the place in which branches and divergences of the rhizomian do meet, no as the source they stem from, rather, as a junction they pass through, one on top of the other, sharing a common moment.

 

Yariv sees it as a place of energetic joining, a unification of strangers recharging at the same spot. The energetic paths a person leaves behind him as a sign of his momentary presence in a place, as testimony of a passing meeting in the one person's memory, accumulate in Yariv's work in to a multi- layered multi- period archeological galaxy.