Yaacov Dorchin: iron folds and line gestures, retrospective

Fourteen years ago, the Museum exhibited a fascinating chapter from Yaacov Dorchin's work – the series "Blocked Well". Attempting to define the influence of those sculptures on the viewer's gaze, I noted in the catalogue introduction that they are built of seemingly unbridgeable contraries: on the one hand, the flow of industrial material not yet processed, and on the other hand structures like the "dome", made and measured with astonishing perfection. The molten iron which became encrusted in forms recalling stalactites and stalagmites is welded and grafted into restrained geometrical structures, similar to neoclassical models of late 18th century utopian architecture (e.g. Etienne Louis Boulée). Time, too, appears in two unbridgeable registers: as actual=concrete moment, and, in contrast, an eternal moment where the material has sunk into itself and become part of an infinite and supratemporal whole. The perceptual response to these sculptures is also divided into two needs of the viewer: the rich materiality invites the eye to wander into these protuberances and pits, inviting an intimate contract with the material – yet this huge mass seems to cancel out the value of its details, and seeks to act upon the viewer with the might of its foreign, distant weight. This oscillation between far and near, industrial and intimate, negative and positive, accidental and predictable, is typical of Dorchin's work. The present exhibition focuses on bi-dimensional and tri-dimensional works, and a similar experience seems valid for the entirety of Dorchin's work – since he began as a painter in the late 1960's, until today.