Thoughts

I said a work is a mutation: Rochelle Owens - 1988

Presentation by Yehoshua Rahamim Dufour

"Listening to our reactions to these works of art is the best way of discovering our inner treasure. What characterizes the art of Roee Suffrin and what it evokes in those who look at it daily is perfectly expressed in the thoughts of great thinkers and artists.
As scribe, I have noted below the thoughts of some of these great minds, if one imagined them standing before this display of Suffrin's paintings.
Roee Suffrin succeeds in expressing without words or thoughts the truth which they have articulated from time immemorial".

Arthur Rimbaud
Letter from a Seer, to Paul Demeny, May 15.1871. He is 17 years old on the picture.

"I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a see by a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness: he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him and keeps only their quintessences. Inexpressible torture where he needs all the faith, superhuman strength, where he becomes, above all others, the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed, -- and the supreme Savant – For he arrives at the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone else! He reaches the unknown, and when, terrified, he ends up by losing the meaning of his visions, at least he has seen them!"

Honoré de Balzac
Hope is a memory that desires.

Jorge Luis Borges
A handful of sand which we move is enough to modify a desert.

René Char
Immerse yourself into the deep unknown. Force yourself to swirl.

Eugène Delacroix
- In paintings, a mysterious bridge seems to forge itself between the soul of the figures and that of the spectator (Diary 2.10.1822).
- Color has no meaning for intelligence but it is all-powerful over sensibility.
- Ingenious artifice, when it pleases or is expressive, is the essence of art (Diary. 18.7.1850)

Madame de Stael
If we could imagine the impressions our soul was capable of before it discovered language, we would better understand the effect of painting and music (De L'Allemagne. Part II. Ch. 32.p.379).

Emily Dickinson
Beauty is not caused, it is.

Albert Einstein
- It is the duty of every man to return to the world at least as much as he has received.
- The value of a man should be seen in what he gives and not in what he can receive.
- Three ideals have illuminated my path and have often given me the courage to confront life with optimism: goodness, beauty and truth.

Epitectus

- If God had created colors, without creating at the same time eyes capable of seeing and distinguishing them, what use would they have been? And if He had created colors and eyes without creating light, of what use would the colors and eyes have been? Who, then, created these three inter-related things? Who is the author of this wonderful alliance? It is God. Providence therefore exists.

- When you are in your room at night, the door firmly closed and the light extinguished, beware of saying that you are alone. For you are not.

Mahatma Gandhi
We must become the change we want to see in the world.

Kahlil Gibran
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

André Gide
What is important is your gaze, not the object gazed.

Victor Hugo
Imitate nothing and no one. A lion who copies a lion becomes a monkey.

Carl Gustav Jung
Life calls not for perfection, but completeness.

Leonardo da Vinci
- What did philosophy teach me? To be ready for any eventuality.
- All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.

Oren Lyons
Man sometimes believes he has been created in order to dominate, to lead. But he is mistaken. He is just a part of everything.

Magritte
I strive to paint only pictures which evoke the mystery of the world.
For this to be possible, I must be fully awake, which means I must cease identifying with ideas, feelings and sensations.

Henry Miller
- Let us stop murdering one another. The earth is not a fair, neither is it a prison. The earth is Paradise, the only one we will ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don't have to make it a Paradise, it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it. The man with a gun, the man with murder in his heart cannot possible recognize Paradise, even when he is shown it.

- Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Anna de Noailles
The body is a unique place of dreams and reason, an asylum of desire, images and sounds.

Pascal
We never worry about being venerated in cities we pass through (Fragment. Sel. 65)
Two infinites. The middle. If we read too quickly or too slowly, we hear nothing (Fragment Sel. 74)

Nicolas Poussin
Art professes to express the things that are silent (reported by Delacroix. Oeuvres litteraires 11 p. 100)

Antoine de Saint Exupery
- To be a man is to be responsible. It means to feel that one's own stone contributes to building the edifice of the world.

- I have always loved the desert. You sit on a sand dune. You see nothing. You hear nothing. And yet something shines in silence.

Jacques Salomé
In a couple, the important thing perhaps is not to want to make the other happy. It is to make oneself happy and to offer this happiness to the other.

Sin Heum Sangshon
The moon that shines over the mountain is mine.

Jonathan Swift
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

Tao Te Ching
All the world knows beauty as beauty.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Autumn is winter's spring.

Vincent van Gogh
The painter, in short, says nothing, remains silent, and I prefer this.
(Letters by van Gogh to his brother Theo).

Paul Cezanne
Let us accord a special place to Paul Cezanne and his perceptions, which so well characterize the work and artistic personality of Roee Suffrin. They were recorded by Cezanne's son. A wonderful example of filial transmission, so vital for people of talent:

- The artist must flee from literature in art.
- Art is the revelation of an exquisite sensibility.
- Sensitivity characterizes the individual: at its most perfect level, it characterizes the artist.
- The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.
- The artist objectifies his sensitivity, his native individuality.
- The nobility of the concept reveals to us the soul of the artist.
- The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.
- The artist finds joy in being able to communicate to others his enthusiasm for the wonders of nature whose mystery he feels he possesses.
- Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.
- For the artist, seeing means conceiving, and conceiving means composing, for the artist does not note his emotions like a bird modulates its chirp: he composes.
- Art is a religion. Its aim is to elevate thought.
- He who does not strive for perfection, is content with quiet mediocrity.
- A powerful organizational intelligence is the most perfect collaboration of the senses for the creation of a work of art.
- An artistic formula is perfect when it matches the character and grandeur of the subject interpreted.
- Style is not created through servile imitation of the masters: it proceeds from the artist's particular way of feeling and expressing himself.
- From the way an artistic conception is rendered, we can judge the artist's quality of thought and conscience.
- Nature is deep. Between the artist and his model lies a plane, the atmosphere. Bodies seen in space are all convex. The atmosphere forms the unchanging Retourground of the screen on which all contrasts of color, all accidents of light decompose themselves. It constitutes the envelope of a painting by contributing to its synthesis and general harmony. We can thus say that to paint means to contrast.
- Painting, like any art, comprises a technique, a workman like handling of material, but the accuracy of a tone and the felicitous combination of effects depend entirely on the choice made by the artist. The artist does not directly perceive all the relationships: he feels them. Correct sensitivity and complete realization create style. To produce a painting means to compose.

I found exactly in these words of Philippe Dagen (journal Le Monde, 29.04.2008) what is my feeling about the paintings of Roee Suffrin:
" There is something special in the paintings of Francisco Goya, as there is in only a handful of other artists. What makes these artists great is that we feel we know them, we have looked many times at their paintings, and yet, every time we do so, we are surprised, we see something we did not see before and we emerge with new ideas." (traduction).