France, the
many suns and splendours of his journeys in spite of the horrors of wartime,
and the tragic turning points of his century were to enable him while still
young to interiorize and mark, with his own personal seal his “magnificent”
fist works, a crossroads, the meeting place of multiple paths.
The tireless traveller
was to cross Europe, stopping only to draw inspiration now from the twilit moon
skies of Sweden, now from the hot blazing of the suns of Provence, and go on and
on, adding to his palette an ever deeper, ever-widening knowledge of the world
and of man.
Yet he reminds a man, and
four women and seven daughters will enable him to draw even more from the well-springs of his own being – they
are all his muses. Women, at their weddings, bearing in their arms the eternal
bouquet of flowers his mother holds in the photograph that is always present
before the eyes of this artist with the art of a child.
The eyes of his
characters express the pain of century’s martyrdom, and it is in the brightness
of his violent colours that you can read his hymn to life, even though this
life is wounded and broken by the horrors of the Shoa.
But Raya SORKINE can also
save us from forgetfulness by his mastery of the art of having his clowns juggle, his violinists play, by all these
Russian Jews that live forever though
their movements, the reds and yellows that they must have longed to embody down
the years.
These groups of contrasts
and contraries blend in a perfect harmony from which springs an art as lively
as it is mystical, bursting with a life that inspires dreams, in quest of all
the forgotten, frozen moments of the past, the universal memory of mankind.
These women, men,
portraits of Rabbis, all engaged in or escaped from a recent past, are brought
back to life by the burst of bright colours, magical yellows, reds, and blues
that cannot but point us towards a reflective, serene optimism.
It is the colour-language
of a true “Sabra” that enthralls us.
All this resounds in me
and echoes my own feelings. This mutual emotion is why we have been friends for
more than fifteen years, for in RAYA I have as much affection for the man as
for the artist who, through his paintings, shares his "joie de vivre".
