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
An expressive art genre surreptitiously imparting visual messages, Roth’s théamorphic images are nature-composed metaphors. They are discovered shapes by a discerning eye in the most common places where they reside imperceptibly. Indoor and outdoor, in the glorious veneers of dilapidated structures, in plaster, in stones or remnants of paint, and blots just about everywhere. Roth bears witness to the passage of time, unearthing the past to adorn the present. His focus on subtle coloration, depth, and complexity of surfaces creates avant-garde allegories, evocative abstract portraits, and mysterious landscapes.
By imbuing the inanimate with character, Roth transforms overlooked relics that have survived the ravages of time into remarkably dazing imagery. Théamorphic images are aesthetic time-spaces. The name Théamorphism originates from combining the Greek words ‘théa’, meaning view, and ‘morphe’, meaning form. The art form integrates photography, digital painting, various digital techniques to actuate concealed imagery, and archival pigment printing. ©2023 Avi Roth