III. Motif and Form (1960-1962)
Yona Fischer, Catalogue: "Itineraries and Forms", 1976
1956-59 Serves as Israeli ambassador to Brazil.
Aroch hardly paints during this period.
1959-62 Serves as ambassador to Sweden.
Paints What's New at Home?, Jewish Motif and the series, Arches and Tzakpar.
The series Tzakpar was painted in 1962, and parts of it are displayed here along with several pages from sketchbooks.
A similar quest for an "abstract-concrete" form is visible in the paintings from the Arches series (1961), whose form may have derived from the form of Jewish Motif, that is, the Torah Ark and the Tablets of Law.
"The freedom abstract art brought to this world seemed to me highly attractive. On the other hand, the chaos and the total breaching of barriers was disheartening. American abstract expressionism (De Kooning, etc.) repelled me. I wanted to create objects that would be well-defined but at the same time detached from the figurative, from reality, like any form in abstract painting. I had never drawn, and now I didn't stop drawing. I was looking for a defined form, an 'object,' that is, the opposite of something chaotic. I filled sketchbooks with attempts to examine the form to myself, for my own sake".
"I remember a cobbler's sign hanging on a wall in Kharkov, my native city. It showed a boot with some gold residues. I had remembered the sign as a 'work of art,' but when I tried to paint it from memory I failed. I began to change the form, using a pencil. I removed here and added there until the form satisfied me as a boot form. When I looked at it again, I realized that no one would believe me it's a boot. On the other hand, the form that evolved from the boot was, so I thought, concrete (as opposed to abstract), with a right to exist, the right to exist that I wanted to show embodied in the abstract object as I defined it earlier.
And what is a Tzakpar? When I was working on the painting my son Yonatan came to see me and I couldn't tell him what it was, or maybe I wanted to be a wiseacre, so I told him it was a Tzakpar."
From an interview with the artist, July 12, 1966.
