Raya Sorkine was born in Paris on June 22, 1936. It was born from a mutual adoration between mother and son that the painter Raya Sorkine chose this pseudonym. It was under his mother's first and last name that Alain-François (his real first name) signed his paintings.
This Jewish culture of Central Europe, whose childhood was inhabited by the stories and customs of his elders, resonates in all his painting, illuminated as it is by traditional Jewish festivals and music. But it is nevertheless insufficient to restrict his work to this essential influence, certainly, but not exhaustive, Raya Sorkine mixes in his paintings all the mixes due to the cultural differences that he carries within him from childhood, then in adolescence.
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France, the many suns and the magnificence of his travels and this, despite the horror of times of war, the tragic turning points in the history of his century will allow him, very young, to approach, to internalize and then mark with his original seal a beginning of "magnificent" work, crossroads of a thousand encounters. This tireless traveler, will cross Europe, stopping only to be inspired sometimes by the skies tinted by the Swedish lunar half-measures or the warm bursts of the Provençal sun, continues again and again to add to his palette his thousand knowledges of the world.
But he is a man, and it is from his four wives and his seven daughters that he will draw even more from himself: all will be his muses. These are the women who marry, carrying the eternal bouquet of flowers that his mother holds in her arms in the omnipresent photo to his artist's eyes and his eternal child's heart.
It is in the eyes of her characters that the pain of the martyr of this century is expressed, it is in the lights of the violence of colors that we find above all the hymn to life, although wounded, broken by the horrors of the Shoah. Raya Sorkine nevertheless knows how to preserve us from oblivion by mastering the art of making her clowns juggle, of making her violinists play, all these Russian Jews eternally alive thanks to the movements, to the red, yellow colors of which they would certainly have wanted to be the representatives through time.
These sets of contrasts, of constraints merge into a perfect harmony from which will be born a painting as lively as mystical, explosive as dreamlike, in search of all these forgotten moments frozen in the past, universal memory of humanity. These women, these men, these portraits of Rabbis, all mixed or survivors of a recent past, are reborn by the explosion of the most vivid colors, yellow, red, blue, magical that cannot guide us towards a thoughtful and serene optimism. It is the colorful language of a true "Sabra" that transports us.
