VI. Basic Forms: digit and profile, eight and boat (1966-1970)
Yona Fischer, Catalogue: "Itineraries and Forms", 1976
1968 Solo exhibition at the Israel Museum: 48 works spanning 1953-1968.
Recipient of the Israel Museum's Sandberg Prize (with Igal Tumarkin).
Paints Boat.
1969 Paints An Exercise on the Line of 8 and the series Ornament and Profile.
1970 Paris. Makes the lithograph Crossed Profiles.
Since 1966 Aroch tends toward intimate adaptation of forms, which, compared to earlier ones, are primary forms he develops into his own images in both "narrative" and formal contexts.
For example, the digit 2, painted countless times by an anonymous hand on the margins of a page in the Sarajevo Haggadah: Aroch uses this digit to both tell a "story" and create the "profile" form.
Another example, the digit 8, evolves into a boat. "For the basic forms in the line 8 I'm indebted to the painting teacher Christian Ludolf Reinhold, who taught in his 1784 book that 'one can make various pleasant exercises using the line 8.' To the same source I'm grateful for the ornaments in the series Ornament and Profile."
"The constant scuttle between real, natural visual influences and the constant, inevitable battle against the routine. Influence and impression are natural, justified phenomena.
And there is no harm in learning from how others use materials, on the contrary.
Yet it is necessary, at times even pleasant, to finally return to your own song.
Hence the importance of always returning to the basic element, to primary forms and things."
(1973)
