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Veronique essuie la face de Jesus - His face is wiped VI by Arnold Daghani

Veronique essuie la face de Jesus - His face is wiped VI by Arnold Daghani

Arnold Daghani was born in Suceava, then Austro-Hungarian, now Romania.

He was conscripted into the army aged 23 and later put into a forced labour camp with his wife by the Nazis. After World War II he moved to Israel (in 1959), then to France and later to Switzerland. In 1977 he decided to move to England and lived in Sussex until he died in 1985.

His experience of anti-Semitism and forced labour first suggested to Daghani the idea of the suffering of the Jews being akin to suffering of Christ. To him it seemed logical to use Jesus as a symbol of the historic and continuing prejudice against the Jewish race.

In this series of lithographs he takes the traditional Christian device of the Stations of the Cross to express Christ's martyrdom and suffering and provide an aid to contemplation. He uses handwritten texts and shorthand symbols to represent details of the respective stages of Christ's journey to his execution.