Volf Roitman
Volf Roitman (Russian: Волф Ройтман) (30 December 1930 in Montevideo, Uruguay – 25 April 2010)[1] was a painter, sculptor and architect, sometimes referred to as a Renaissance Man, the son of Jewish Russian/Romanian parents.
Most recently, Roitman started to produce large transformable wall hangings called MADI Banners on silk and metal, some of which are applied on transparent surfaces glowing as stained glass windows.
[2] Roitman navigated through the Parisian avant-garde scene of cafes, studios and galleries where he drew his main inspiration during those years from the Belgian master George Vantongerloo.
From the beginning, his personal style involved a predominant use of circles, a complete break with Piet Mondrian’s sacrosanct straight linear structures and his orthogonal rigidity, a heresy for which he, like Georges Vantongerloo would often be signaled out and, on occasion, rebucked."
Two years later, in New York City, this process led to his series of “Memories of Balanchine” (1958–1960), real MADI ballets...A pure joy and an example for new generations.
MADI historical artists in show are Arden Quin, Volf Roitman, Juan Bay, Martín Blaszko, Gyula Kosice, and Rhod Rothfuss.
Participants are Arden Quin, Bolivar, Chubac, Demarco, Garcia-Rossi, Lapeyrère, Melé, Poirot-Matsuda, Faucon, Belleudy, Caporicci, Desserprit, Le Cousin, Nemours, Presta, Blaszko, Caral, Decq, Girodon, Jonquière, Leppien, Piemonti, Sobrino, and Roitman, who is now working full-time on his paper collages and starting to apply the same three-dimensional principles of his collages to his first metal work, reliefs and sculpture pieces.
(See catalogues) 9 April 1994: Inauguration of the one-man show Volf Roitman, Obras MADI at Centro de Arte La Rectoria, St-Pere-de-Vilamajor (Greater Barcelona), Spain, curated by Josep Plandiura.
A conference, attended by Tomás Maldonado, founder of the Argentine movement, Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, and a former member of MADI Argentina, is given by Roger Neyrat and Volf Roitman in the Dorval gallery on June 18.
1996: 7 March– 3 April: MADI Internacional, 50 Ans Despuès, a groundbreaking international exhibition curated by Cesar Lopez-Osornio and shown at the Centro de Exposiciónes y Congresos of the Ibercaja Bank in Zaragoza, Spain.
20 September, at the Albuquerque Museum, Roitman gave a conference in which he introduced his philosophy of MADI-Ludico architecture, the ideas for which grew out of his works with 3-dimensional collages and laser-cut sculpture: "Strictly polygonal design of asymmetric façades ...geometric forms with sharply defined colors and contours, tri-dimensional surfaces, a clearly 'ludico' (playful) spirit...the same basic computer program can produce an almost inexhaustible series of different exterior panels.
This system provides us with the means to overthrow the tyranny of the module which has, with few exceptions, ruled architecture from the time of ancient Egypt..." The same day, in the same city, he inaugurated a solo show at the Arte Struktura Gallery.
In addition, an entire room at the Reina Sofía is devoted to a Roitman architectural model – his vision of a MADI building “where constant interplays of light and shadow situated the edifice in a chimerical constructivist category ... a game of spatial echoes”.
Roitman originated and helped to organize the first North American exhibition exclusively devoted to MADI: "Outside the Box: Eleven International MADI Artists Featuring Carmelo Arden Quin and Volf Roitman From the Masterson and The Lenherr Collections," shown at the Polk Museum in Lakeland, Florida from August to October 2001 and at the Gulf Coast Museum in Largo, Florida, from November to January 2002.
The building's two principal facades were completely transformed by two-store high sculptural works specially created by Roitman during a fifteen-month period – asymmetrical pieces of the bright colors, drenched in ludic or whimsical cuts and folds and bolted to a mirrored background.
As both an artist and a man, Uruguayan-born, Argentine-educated, and Parisian-nurtured Volf Roitman is as difficult to seize as a woodland faun; as impossible to define as his multi-faceted, constantly changing kinetic sculptures.
Starting at the end of the 60s, MADI zigzagged in and out of Roitman's life; on occasion, he wrote the prefaces for Arden Quin shows and mulled over the idea of making collages.
He built three models reproducing Normandy's beaches and villages where Dwight D. Eisenhower's Army invasion took place, for the 20th Century film The Longest Day, and later, some of the largest (up to 55 square meters) architectural projects of this period.
The same year, Roitman and Arden Quin launched Ailleurs (8 issues until 1966), a French revue which published the latest in experimental art; and in the seventies, he also became involved in Parisian avant-garde film and literature.
An eclectic cinematographic career (productions of short films, script writing, introduction into France of films from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Iran, Kuwait, etc., distribution; owner of a 2-screen art house in the Beaubourg section of Paris) 1981: Published Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Feudal Country, a pamphlet that became famous in the cinema profession, where Roitman denounced the abuses of the monopolistic cinema system of distribution circuits: In 1985, under the pseudonym Dupond Dupont, he published another pamphlet: D'Où Vient la M… ( From Where the Sh...is Coming.)
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.
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.
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.
