COFFEEGRAPHS
Roth has developed a new and unique art form as layered as its components – coffee, artistry, history, philosophy, emotion, and intellectual curiosity. Each artwork is a journey of imagination, reflection, and discovery. Roth manipulates his canvas through insights as he tilts the surface, spreads the medium, water-burns its density, scrapes away or adds further layers, he sees each image as predestined.
Coffee is an organic miracle with extraordinary characteristic transcending the quality of ordinary pigments. It has the ability to flow and create expressive distortions. Layering coffee amalgam creates three-dimensional depth, thus making it the ideal pigment to depict paintings of mythological, allegorical, or anthropomorphic subjects.
PHOTOGRAPHS
CHROMA
THE HELPLESS
THE HOPEFULS
URBAN SPACE
CREATIVE FIZZ
Born in Transylvania, Roth emigrated to Israel in 1960. His earliest images from the sixties document exactly what his more recent images do: specific, unencumbered moments. He came of age in a period when the psychedelic, beatnik sensibility and its concomitant dissidence was penetrating the culture of art-making.
Roth, however, is a street poet of a different kind. He knows that poignancy more often comes from the hard work of waiting and revising than from accidental encounters. Roth’s job, which he does with agility, is to show that a single instant, no matter where it occurs or whom it includes, can be intricate, rich, tender, familiar and redolent. And, in looking at his work, you will undoubtedly catch yourself saying, “I am not a stranger here.”
THÉAMORPHISM
Abstract
Walls, doors, floors, enclosures, and other similar surfaces have numerous important functions: shelter, shield, fortify, and secure. All are regarded as passive and static matter. Through an attempt to understand the visual appeal of these impassive surfaces, I discovered a random stimulus of complex playgrounds showing the phenomenon of Pareidolia and Apophenia. In a timeless existence of their own, these inactive constructions with protective texture-coatings, crevices, and age-old ruptures, conceal a world of dynamic patterns, shapes, and forms that reveal embedded imagery.
Are these designs appearances of metaphysical noumenon that birth psychological phenomenon? Metaphors that provide meaningful life analogies? Or perhaps an expressive art form surreptitiously imparting visual messages?
In my heuristic effort to further unearth these hidden manifestations, I chose to preserve a visual vocabulary pleading to be born in a new art form I name Théamorphism. It originates from combining the Greek words ‘théa’, meaning view, and ‘morphe’, meaning form.
Théamorphic images are artistic expressions created by a visionary world of the mind, assigning human characteristics to objects in a parallel existence with physical reality, and beyond. The art form integrates photography, digital painting, various digital technics to actuate concealed imagery, and archival pigment printing. ©2023 Avi Roth