Volf Roitman - Return To Visual Arts

Return To Visual Arts

The siren song of MADI called again. All of Roitman’s frenzied activity gradually gelled into an enduring passion for a particular style of architectural sculpture where each morsel of his past experience found its niche. Starting with a two-dimensional surface and using only a box-cutter and his own dexterity, he arrived at three-dimensionality – complex abstract sculpture pieces formed from a single sheet of paper. On the surface, this cutout and folded work from the early 80s and 90s might seem a derivative of Japanese origami, but in reality its complex and whimsical nature is closer to children’s pop-up books of the Victorian era.

The magic of laser cutting soon led to metal sculptures so delicately and intricately delineated that they were often mistaken for the paper collages that had preceded them ten years before. Roitman’s obsessions with asymmetry and the ludico whimsical also found their way into MADI new concepts that he kept mastering. This led to the kinetic pieces he showed at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art in 2002 and 2006…rotational towers and mural works, as geometric in form as sea anemones, swaying and grasping to the rhythm of unseen currents while curious organic parts open and close…The spectator has no need to walk around these sculptures; every facet will be revealed as color-drenched undulating forms change with each 360 degree turn the piece.

Roitman’s interests in literature, cinema and politics also came together in his newest Project – large MADI “books” dedicated to The Celebration of Dissent, with Mae West and Groucho Marx sharing places of honor with other revolutionaries – the serious and the less so.”