Jerusalem, Jan. 20, 1995

I have had the privilege of knowing Joel Kass for more than three years. Some of my philosopher-colleagues took me to see him and were responsible for my discovery of his paintings. This discovery was a real shock for me. One cannot fail to be struck by the pictorial power of his work and the vehemence of its message.

If I try to account for this emotion, at once aesthetic and spiritual, I think I can find two explanations (I speak here as a philosopher, but there are experiences where "the heart has its reasons which reason does not know"!). First of all, as a Professor of Philosophy in the Order of St. Dominic and in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I was impressed by the formal aspect of Joel Kass's work. The violence which one senses in the painter's soul is held back by a rigorous style and a highly rhythmic sense of composition. Fantastic looking figures are integrated into a geometry of skilfully constructed volumes, and the play of colours, whose variety and arrangement deserve to be carefully noticed, confirms and sometimes transfigures - when the painter's vision is too harsh - the poetic significance of the message.

But I am not only a philosopher: I am first of all a Dominican friar, responsible for a small community, the Maison Saint Isaie, whose essential purpose is to serve as a Christian centre of Jewish studies in Jerusalem and Israel. Since, in consequence, I am adviser to the Vatican Commission for Relations with Judaism, I have discovered in the course of reflection 1and study the terrible reality of the Jewish destiny and of the Shoah. I could therefore not do otherwise than to feel directly challenged by the work of Joel Kass.

All the faces and scenes depicted by him in his paintings seem to be drawn directly from his memory. Yet, if it is true to say that his style is extremely original, it is not only his personal memories that he conjures up. He expresses the memory of his people. The cry he lets forth is that of the Jewish soul. He is the singer of Israel's destiny.

But the hallmark of a great artist is that, in his work, the particular attains universality. In this respect, Joel Kass bears witness to the representative quality of the Jewish destiny, both in darkness and light, in love and in desperation. The Shoah exemplifies to the point of madness the suffering and distress inherent in every human life, and, on a deeper level, it demonstrates the existence of evil in the world. Joel Kass is truly a witness to our period. He expresses by his cry the feeling that any man of our time must have in the midst of the horrors, which surround and threaten him. He foreshadowed in his pictures, long before we saw their terrible images on our television-screens, the tragedies of which we are the helpless spectators: the famine in Somalia, the flames of Sarajevo, the massacres in Rwanda, the killings and destruction which inevitably take place in the course of wars and rebellions. We live in a broken world, in a shattered humanity. Man has never felt himself to be so much alone, so frail and so threatened. Joel Kass has made himself the interpreter of mankind seeking to survive these calamities.

In an even broader perspective, by his very violence he is the painter of the vicissitudes of daily life, whose depth and hidden urgency he helps us to perceive: love, solitude, joy, tears. It is enough to draw attention to the important place, which, like Rouault, Fellini or Chaplin, he gives to circuses and clowns in his representation of the world. Here, Joel Kass combines sadness and humour in his observation of man and life: a tragic humour, a misery redeemed by humour!

Looking at these canvases as a philosopher, one finds that they contain a whole metaphysic. More exactly, as a man of faith and a theologian, I notice in Joel Kass's work a very special expression of what I might call a philosophy of evil and human suffering. This is not a pessimistic or bitter philosophy. Quite the contrary: I feel that through the representation of the most commonplace, darkest and most painful aspects of reality, Joel Kass poignantly expresses a wound, an awaiting, a question.

Despite its forcefulness, or rather, because of its forcefulness, Joel Kass's work causes us to "see voices": to listen, to give ear. It is an invitation to silence: personally, I would go so far as to say it is an invitation to prayer. It brings us into a silence, which however, is not one of despair or despondency. It is quite the contrary. In transfiguring the most tragic reality by means of colour and transcending it through the stringency of his forms, Joel Kass brings out the longing for eternity that exists in the depths of each moment of duration.

His painting is truly a fruit of silence, of what tradition rightly calls the contemplative life. That is why I hope he will be given the possibility of exploiting, in the silence and meditation of an assiduous labour, the genuine resources of creativity and expression, which make him an exceptional artist.

I would be happy, for my part, to have contributed to the realization of that possibility.