Exhibition

An exhibition of watercolours and drawings. Alexander Rappaport is best known as an architectural theoretician and philosopher, a renowned thinker whose relationship with paper is foremost expressed in his mastery of the written word. This graphic series was begun in the 1980s, the private visual meditations on life and the surrounding environment. Packed into a small suitcase they accompanied the author in his migrations: St. Petersburg (Leningrad then) and Moscow, then London, and finally Latvia where he has lived for the last 20 years in a remote coastal village.

These deeply personal watercolour sketches reveal a painterly philosophy and poetics; the author’s autobiography, musings on life, architecture, the history of art – all find their way into their fabric.

Many works are an ode and meditation on architecture, that intermediary between human life and the environment. Interiors and exteriors, objects and vistas, arches, rooms, doorways and frames - all come together in a framework of symbolic, almost anthropomorphic objects. The lone empty chair as a recurring leitmotif points to the artist’s invisible presence. Humans, don’t feature too often, sometimes faceless they become part of the furniture. While shadows have a weighty and palpable presence.

This existentialism, it seems found particular melancholy in the late soviet reality which surrounded their creator. Rappaport’s works interweave influences such as the poetics of Joseph Brodsky, the graphic style of the Moscow conceptualists, the paper architects (all of whom were in his circle of friends); as well as his favourite artists from Breughel to Magritte.