IX. The Good Fellows Of The Beginning of the Century (1968-1974)
Yona Fischer, Catalogue: "Itineraries and Forms", 1976
1967-68 Paints In Ratchik's Shop.
1968 Paints Two Cubes, based on Reinhold's book.
1970-71 Paints Form.
1972 Works in the tiny studio he set up in the basement of his home.
Aroch's last years were marked by an intense intellectual attempt to establish a body of contexts in his work, far beyond its visual appearance.
His ruminations about the limits the canvas's fixed form could impose on the form within it seem to have prompted him to treat the canvas margins ("I saw that I could help the patch dwell in peace with the border, the frame, if I treated the edges," he said about the purplish form that contains the Tzakpar), to deny the rectangle's wholeness (Four Parts), to transgress its limits (Agrippas Street), to create a three-dimensional illusion within it (Two Cubes) and, finally, to develop inside it a three-dimensional form (see the transition from the 1970 Form to the relief Form of 1972).
Aroch referred to this way of working as his "trademark": "Every painter has his trademark, which is not painting. For example, Tatlin's is the material, Duchamp's is the chair. Mine is the evolution of the Tzakpar form out of the boot." The development of a form out of a form is not a mere technical matter but, rather, an important element in a structure where materials, forms, notations and images (Bundle of Facts B.) find their place as an interpretation of times, places and forms that belong to the artist's past but also to his cultural and spiritual heritage.
As the artist intimated, the forms in In Ratchik's Shop (1967-68) and In Memory of the Good Fellows of the Beginning of the Century (1969) are based on the Russian constructivists' search, in the 1920s, for the two-dimensional and three-dimensional form. In this search Aroch discerns the possibility of creating a form that would be both primary and unique. His own search in Form (1974) is to be understood in the context of his emotional and intellectual identification with those artists' search. This work has remained unfinished, and Aroch thought of using it in the future. "The form is cut in cardboard, which is glued on plywood. Plywood isn't nice, but it can be fixed. I'm not happy with the format of this form. It has nothing to it. It's less than abstract, but it contains a lot. It has a sort of foot reaching forward, another backward. What matters is the relation between the elements, walking and limping, and the board, which will underscore the wood's thickness."
