Excerpts from Interviews

From a Conversation with Yariv

A head, like anything else in nature, has no static existence. I see it more as a kind of movement — perhaps analogous to a ventilator in motion: if we observe the latter from outside we will not see blades spinning round, rather something resembling a solid surface area. If the head is visualized as relative to both the space inside it and that outside, we will discover new relationships from every angle we look. This perception of the head stems from the question posed by Giacometti. Michelanglo, however, saw the sculpture unfolding before him as the projection of an idea.

My own starting-point is actually zero. I look for what is inside me at that moment. It comes from chaos. Every new beginning takes me back to a previous beginning and to one which preceded that. Sometimes it starts with a dead point in a pervious sculpture which I am trying to revive and from there I am hurled into the dark. Or it might begin with a first bit of material which I place on the stand. What is important to me in sculpture is not confined to the material in which I find myself. The sculpture begins somewhere in space and ends somewhere in space. The block becomes some point of focus permitting continuity of movement in space.

Most of my drawings were not done in one go, but some are from one encounter. When I work in nature, I try to set the original sketch aside in order to preserve the freshness. The question is what you want to achieve. It is true that maintaining the freshness of a painting over time is difficult but artists are also differentiated by the size of the burden they assume.

My point of departure is the non-existence of reality. I have to struggle to make it exist. I cannot help expressing my view of the world, although I dislike the concept, "self-expression". There are artists who live in harmony with the world and feel no need to fight it. As far as others are concerned, the world does not even exist until they have recreated it from scratch.

Pain has no guardians. Whoever uses the media only to express what is human may interest me as a person but his work will not. Whoever produces aesthetic perfection without expressing the human will not interest me beyond observation. The human naturally outstrips the personal, while the work begins at the point where man and his sicknesses confront the clarity of the music.

Sculpture for me is the breaking of the image, meaning the act of Abraham. "Thou shalt not make graven or molten images" — this would seem to be the essence of all that stands in contradiction to plastic art. However, I also see in the Bible the most blatant expression of the inseparable connection between conceptualization and reality. The way I see it, "Thou shalt not" is a striving for truth, an attempt to create a non-sculpture. Hesitating between abstraction and working from nature, I chose nature not from a desire to create its image but in an attempt to grasp the very phenomenon of its existence.

(Zvi Lachman Head Tel-Aviiv: Gordon Gallery, 1993)

From a Conversation with Yan Rauchwerger

My mother’s — that’s a colour I have inside me. That’s not something I’d be able to render with tonality or by any other means, either in sculpture or in drawing. Something in my experience as a human being is an experience in colour. I remember in colour and in form. My colour-memory exists as independent of the dimension of time. Form exists in the tension between the moment of remembering and the moment of the past event. I think that in drawing, I attempt to combine the two.

I find the separation between colour and sculpture arbitrary. Because the phenomenon of seeing is connected to light, it always contains within it an element of colour. In sculpture, I try to arrive at the minimum density, which enables presence; through materiality and trough the flow which is the appearance of the object in light. The surfaces of colour are manifestations of this flow. The tension between the contours of an object and its fluidity, between the attempt to represent an object and the perception of its disintegration in light, intrigue me both in sculpture and in painting.

( Lachman, Gordon Gallery 1997)