613 Artworks — the artist's own mark Yoel Tordjman
Fine Art Estate Editions

The 613

Why six hundred
and thirteen.

613 is תרי״ג המצוות — the commandments of the Torah. He set it as the size of the body of work he meant to complete, and spent four decades getting there.

The artist's scroll of the 613 works
The scroll — every work set out together, and signed.

The count grew while he worked, and his own documents record it growing: 400 works in the price list of 2015, around 550 by the catalogue of 2016, 613 by 2021.

The name he worked under carries the same idea. Tordjman comes from מְתוּרגְּמָן — the translator, the one who carries meaning from one side to the other. A bridge. It is in the mark he drew for himself, too: the numerals stand on an arch.

My canvas is a screen and my materials are coloured particles of light.

Yoel Tordjman, artist statement, from his own catalogue.

He counted as he went

The artist's own poster of 2017 showing 550 works in sixteen series
January 2017 — his own card, in his own words: 550 artworks, 16 series, and his signature. Four years before the 613 scroll.

He published the count as it grew. The card above is his, sent as a new year's greeting at the start of 2017: every work he had made to that point, laid out as small tiles, with the number stated plainly underneath.

It is the clearest evidence we have of the pace of it — 400 works in the price list of 2015, 550 on this card in January 2017, 613 on the scroll he signed in Tzfat.

What is in this archive, and what is not

The family archive currently holds 486 catalogued records. Of those, 299 have been matched to an archival master file and 187 have not yet been located. A further 180 works found in the archive have been confirmed by the family as his, and are being catalogued now.

So 486 is not the complete body of work, and this store does not present it as such. Reconstructing the full record is ongoing, and the numbers above will change as it proceeds.