Invasion / Dan Gallery

Misha Rapoport

The Beauty of Perception 

By Hagai Segev

The art of the early third millennium is greatly influenced by the worlds of swift technology and the desire for the rapid marketing of products. The ideas and messages conveyed by paintings, photographs, installations and sculptures must therefore be such, that the viewer can accept them instantly. They must evoke the viewer’s interest, quickly luring him in and then letting him go, making room for the next entry.

One of the main characteristics of contemporary art is the undermining of familiar notions. Based on innovation and renewal, this art relentlessly seeks new ways of expression and chases after originality, striving to be different from that which proceeded it. What is the secret of this disruption, what is its goal, how is it expressed and, most importantly, what does it tell us, the viewers, about our culture? For centuries, artists have been creating and inventing the new, but in this age of capitalism, the tempo of change has become a value unto itself. Misha Rapoport is an exception to this rule. He tries to capture the viewer’s attention and make him or her stop for a moment and simply gaze, learn, and enjoy.

Rapoport’s canvases do not bear the standard of the revolution. He comes from the world of classical art, on which he had been educated in his days as a youth in Kazakhstan. But a lot has changed since then, and in his current work, which can be seen in his new exhibition at Dan Gallery, nothing is to be taken for granted.

At first glance, Misha Rapoport’s paintings appear classical, depicting the landscapes and people that populate our world. One can easily recognize familiar or mundane environments, people and painting methods. A second glance, however, reveals that Rapoport undermines these conventions and demands a deeper, more focused study by the viewers, inviting them to try and decipher the messages conveyed by his art.

Rapoport strives to create a bridge between the classical and the contemporary. He does not feel the need to incessantly tell the story of his self; a need he recognizes in many contemporary artists. Art is a bridge between realities and situations, between stories and fairytales and the concrete reality we encounter in our everyday lives. This attitude allows Rapoport to create paintings unbound by times and places, refining connections that also transcend such specificities.

The exhibition’s centerpieces show a seemingly surprising connection between the figure of a nun wearing a white robe and a damaged commercial vehicle. Oscillating between the sacred and the secular, this depiction is most peculiar in the context of Israeli painting. Why would the artist choose to paint a nun, of all things, near a wrecked car that has likely been in an accident? The architectural setting is also unclear. One can surmise that it represents the memory of old structures, perhaps condemned houses, such as those in Jaffa or Neve Tzedek in southern Tel Aviv.

The special connections depicted by Rapoport incite the viewers’ curiosity, making them want to unravel the meanings contained within them. He encourages questions concerning the meaning of the connections and their contexts, allowing the viewers to gaze at them again and again, sharpening their powers of observation. The connections appear illogical, but the ensemble as a whole appears so clear and accessible. This is how the artist settles these contradictions and guides the viewer towards bridging the gaps. 

The sources of the various depictions can be listed: the source of the car wreck can be found around Jaffa’s automobile workshops, where Rapoport’s studio has been located in recent years; the image of the nun is taken from one of Rapoport’s visits to Rome and placed in a more familiar setting; the buildings and the structures are generic buildings from the streets of Jaffa, ranging from 19th century to contemporary architecture.

The title of the exhibition, ‘Invasion’, tells of the invasions of various realities into the canvas space. The feeling that rises from the paintings is one of transition between situations, between times and states of consciousness, converging on one location. It is an invasion of classicism into the contemporary world and a counter-invasion of the contemporary world into a classical state of mind. Rapoport’s use of image editing software, such as Photoshop, as a base for some works, can also be attributed to this aspect of joining and connecting.

The contact points in Rapoport’s work evoke a feeling of drama with a smidge of irony brought on by the unexpectedness of the joined images. The manifestation is classical, but the connections undermine familiar classical structures. Rapoport touches the metaphysical, striving to capture a presence beyond the specific image he had imagined in his mind. The result, therefore, disrupts the viewer’s predictable recognition of the image. To Rapoport, art is more than just a series of images that the viewer may – or should – like; it is a series of hidden messages that penetrate beneath the skin, evoking entire arrays of feelings and sensations – the feeling of the momentary ‘blow’, that special stimulation an artist senses when he feels he has accomplished or attained the most substantive truth of a particular moment. The moment passes, but the canvas that bore witness to that rare moment every artist hopes to experience, remains.

Rapoport creates images and he stops only once he feels he has obtained what he had sought after, not having known how to express his desires in words. He creates metaphysics in painted landscapes and people. He tries to present the conflict between routine life and people’s dreams, feelings and aspirations – the gap between the concrete and the concealed.

Rapoport connects the religious and the mundane, intertwining these two components until they complete each other fully. There is a theatrical, dramatic element in his work, obtained mostly through a Caravaggio-inspired use of light and shadow, alongside a subtle seductive element based on a refined workmanship. As such, it is refined compared to the refinement of Rapoport’s past works, presented in previous exhibitions, mostly at Rosenfeld Gallery.

In the Israeli consciousness, the image of the wrecked car is associated with acts of terror, rather than car accidents. The reference to traffic accidents is less significant whereas the political meaning of a terrorist act is fairly common, mostly in the horrific images seen in the media. In this aspect, too, Rapoport chooses the unexpected path. The immediate association is Andy Warhol’s famous painting of a car wreck. In Warhol’s work, the connection to the original, journalistic photograph is very close, whereas Rapoport uses the classical painting style to keep the depiction in the metaphysical realm. By doing so, he maintains a consistent stylistic mode with that of the nun and the uniformity of the painting as a whole.

The car’s penetration into the image of the nun is an invasion of the machine into the world of the spiritual. Perhaps, this can also be defined as a sort of presence of machinery in the day-to-day, secular realm; a representation of a secular world that disrupts the spiritual one, which the figure of the nun embodies. This unclear connection evokes the thought that not everything is trivial, after all. Without addressing the subject of religion directly, Rapoport makes the statement that religion has become trivial; has, perhaps, grown to resemble a car – a vehicle serving man in his everyday life. The feeling that the world of contemplation and religion has veered off the straight rails it had once remained on, and is now becoming part of the cosmos. “I try to talk about the connection between man and the cosmos”, says Rapoport, “and I say these things without knowing exactly how to talk about them all in one place. The link I create on the canvas allows me to examine these connections and see whether it is possible to talk about them at all”. 

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Rapoport strives to allow the viewers to relive experiences they remember from their youth: of gazing at a work of art for long stretches of time, of the awakening of their imagination and ability to reflect. He feels that today, people who look at works of art treat the viewing as another task to “tick off”. Viewers at galleries and museums pass paintings or sculptures by, almost without having absorbed what their eyes had seen.

The artistic and philosophical statement of art has changed radically. One gets the feeling of a great number of statements with no real depth and no message behind them. There is a tendency in the art scene to say things without truly committing to their meaning. Many artists are anxious of leaving the boundaries created by the media; afraid to speak up their mind, lest they venture beyond the boundaries of consensus and get hurt. 

From this standpoint, Rapoport examines his position regarding the world of contemporary art, in a series of paintings that deal with the most trivial of things – a paper grocery bag. Almost surprisingly, he says: “as an artist, I try to think as little as I can about the alleged, personal, individual statement of my work. I continue working on a certain subject for as long as it interests me. When it stops evoking my interest and curiosity, I prefer to move on, with no regard for the noises around me.” Based on this principle, Rapoport deals with both the spiritual and the mundane. The paper bags or packed objects in other paintings get a life of their own. Thus, these paintings, placed next to each other in the exhibition, or paintings created in the studio during the very same months, move from the rich and the detailed to the meager and simple. Rapoport creates an “intermediate” art that addresses the human existence naturally, as befits the modesty of an artist in constant search of the accurate – and at the same time, the most interesting – way of self expression.