Word: arikha
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...often looks to his wife for assistance, but he remains as feisty as ever. He hasn't lost his enthusiasm for painting, and is happy to talk about Picasso ("He was good until about 1905, then he squandered his talent") or contemporary artists he admires (Balthus, Sam Szafran, Avigdor Arikha). But turn to the subject of photography, and the man who defined "the decisive moment" - the instant when an image should be captured - professes his famous indifference. Truth be told, Cartier-Bresson has returned to his trademark Leica cameras for a couple of assignments - his 1994 portrait of France...
...catalogue essays for the show) calls "an era's bad breath." If Kitaj is not, in fact, the Auden of modern painting, he is quite often discussed as though he were, especially by English critics. Of late, he has also emerged (along with David Hockney and Avigdor Arikha) as one of the few real masters of the art of straight figure drawing in Europe or, for that matter, in the world...
...Arikha's work, trying to stabilize a sight in an unpredictable frequency of marks, is all concentration. Supremely honest, unrhetorical painting, it breathes the air of scrupulous anxiety. He has a surer sense of tone-the visual equivalent of natural pitch-than anyone else painting today, and color is second to it; his images are not meant to soothe or win the eye but to build up a record of their action through a labyrinth of nuances. For this reason, a painting like Anne Leaning on a Table, 1977, is as bracing as it is modest. A high stamina...
...light in Arikha's paintings is dry and chalky. It conveys a sense of frugality, but with no question of expressionist pathos. His motifs are not actors in a drama of pathetic fallacy, but resistant fragments of the world, the nonself. But what is so gripping about his work is the in tensity with which Arikha engages that world. He speaks of the "hunger in the eye" that drew him away from abstract painting in 1965, and kept him doing nothing but black-and-white brush drawings and etchings from life for eight years. In his paintings since...
...Arikha is careful to impose these on his work. Each picture must be done in a day; there are no preliminary studies and, especially, no work from photographs, since photography and painting generalize in different ways. His object, brilliantly realized in some parts of his small and sharply edited output, is to make sight and formal deliberation fuse. The conjunctions within Arikha's work, its breadth of language and depth of feeling set off against its insecurity and self-questioning, make it unlike any thing done by an American figurative painter since Edward Hopper. So does its intelligence. Nothing...