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An extract translated from the book “Pnim – Conversations with Jan Rauchwerger”, by author Michal Peleg.

So out of the craft, as it were, through the very act of working with matter, something new is created, the connections are revealed?

Yes. Connections that I discover through a blot of color, or the shape of eyes or a plate – each time I actually try to understand a connection. A kind of calor… because the picture of reality gives you a photographic picture, and doesn’t allow you to enter within. And my entire work is built in such a way, so as to remove, each time, a layer that conceals the connection from me… if I don’t reach at least several layers that I’ve managed to remove, I have a feeling that I got stuck. And I can’t stand it.

The painting remains flat, so to speak...

Yes. And then I’m willing to get help from anything whatsoever, from that which I see opposite me, from memory, from the work-process, from a running drop of paint, I’d take anything whatever to help me in unraveling […] if it remains related to reality, as if I’ve simply put it inside the frame, it bothers me.

If it remains as an imitation of reality?

That’s right, because in that case nothing happened to me, really – a miracle didn’t happen to me, when all of a sudden a curtain was raised and I’d seen a sort of – of God’s kitchen. It’s a revelation, just like when you take a nail and hit it with a hammer and the nail goes in, the discovery… that there’s a connection between these things. That you walk a step, another step, another step, and you can reach the sea. It’s as if nothing – and suddenly the sea. All one needs is patience – not to expect that after taking a few steps, there will be a sea already.

Jan Rauchwerger. A Portrait
Edited by Mordechai Omer
Catalogue to the exhibition in Tel Aviv Museum
April 2008–04–13

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From the foreword of the catalogue:

Jan Rauchwerger's semi-retrospective exhibition focuses on a single theme among the many comprising his oeuvre: portraiture.
...
Rauchwerger's portraits were presented in his one-person exhibition "In the family: Art as Autobiography", which I curated at the Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan in 1989, (dedicated to the reflection of the artist's private life in his work at the time), and in the exhibition "Four Hours period: Portraits of Israeli Poets", presented in 1997 at the Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv, to mark the publication of a book by that name (published by Even Hoshen).

The current exhibition offers a profound retrospective view of the theme of portraiture in Rauchwerger's work via cross-section such as "self-portrait" or "the Family".

Mordechay Omer