Is it too easy to say that the desert or the ocean are nothing? After all, while they are places which impress us with their vast emptiness, they are also enormously powerful in their presence. The experience of being in the middle of the desert or the ocean makes you feel like all is endless and infinite. In this respect you may undergo an exhilarating sense of transcendence and of the sublime.
Haim Steinbach's work with language proposes that reading is an act of seeing; the graphic codes which proliferate in our current media culture accustom us to word and image arriving in the same package. For the artist, reproducing a phrase or a symbol on the cups represents the action of memorization and preservation, thereby inviting the viewers to focus their attention in order to identify and re-identify with the language and image before them.