The paintings in Iddo Markus’s new show are fragmented – they have no beginning nor end. They include a collection of expressive images: a pregnant woman, a class photo, a group of people dancing, two people embracing, a woman holding a baby. These are gestures, erasures and repetitions of images that are constantly conjured up from the abyss, an index of intimate, private and familial fragments, whose simultaneous appearance denotes the disaster, pain and anxiety of the current period.

Alongside the paintings, Markus prints blown-up images from an archive he has been collecting for years. Form these images he extracts fragments, seemingly banal moments. By means of enlarging and detachment from the full image and original context, the fragments take on a new, unsettling meaning: a child peeking behind his mother’s back, a crouching human skeleton inside a display cabinet, a father holding the hand of his son who has disappeared behind a wall, a family on a trip taking a picture at the foot of a statue of a man wielding a sword. This statue is Elijah and the Prophets of Baal on Carmel, which tells the story of Elijah’s battle with the prophets of Baal. Based on the Biblical story, the confrontation ended with Elijah’s victory, bringing down fire from heaven. Subsequently, the people declared their devotion to God, and Elijah ordered them to seize the prophets of Baal and take them down to the Kishon River, where the people slaughtered them.

The phosphorescent orange in the paintings serves as a backdrop for the events, but it also functions as a secret agent in terms of color, seething beneath the layers of the painting. It features in the title of the exhibition “Agent Orange,” referencing a herbicide produced by the United States Department of Defense, and used by the American military in the Vietnam War. The proclaimed purpose of this substance was to eliminate local vegetation, thus denying guerrilla fighters of shelter and food and forcing the population to flee to areas under American control. In practice, it brought on mass fatalities, illness, disability and birth defects, a devastating impact that had continued for generations, scourging the civilian population of Vietnam, as well as the American soldiers who were deployed there.