Something Sings in Blinding White
The Amazing Painting of Léopold Rabus Stands Apart from Our Modern-Day Princes


With the thicket behind him on the path, he noticed a large clump of earth that had been ripped from the embankment of the meadow. At this place on theembankment, he could make out the combs of a deserted wasp’s nest. In the middle of the crooked hill stood an old shack, its walls bent inward so that the roof touched the ground. Adrian passed along each of the walls, beating on them with a stick to drive out any fox that might have made its home there. He also picked up a few stones and threw them at the roof, breaking one or two of the slates at once.¹
Franz Böni, “Der Dorffuhrmann”


No Morels, but a Steep Climb

“No, they are not here yet,” Léopold Rabus calls through the clear woods as he searches for morels among last year’s leaves, flattened by the freshly melted snow. It is still too early because the winter was the first real winter in years. He is joined once more by his wife, Anna Hirsch, in the climb up the wooded slope, reaching a small, single track heading north. In the blinding light of earliest spring, between the barren, leafless trees, a stupendous view of the snow-covered Alps presents itself in the distance, the unreal realism of their jagged profile projected onto the horizon like a mirage. We make our way in mid-ascent, in parallel with the Lac du Neuchâtel, with the hiking routes of Jura above us and the crowded banks of the summer season below. We are far from the tourist track, on a path trodden by just a few wellinformed locals. We pass by two or three houses built in the 1960s and safely hidden behind high thuja hedges. It is quiet here, very quiet. Rabus raises his hand and points as a bare tree cracks. The hilly pastureland is as yet unvisited by cattle. We approach a farmstead that stretches out at either side of the pathway. A white horse stands in a garage and turns its head, chewing and fixing us with its stare. Rabus heads for a building to the right of the path, crossing trampled-down grass and making me wonder what it is that he wants to show me here. It is such a banal building, neither particularly old nor spectacularly derelict, tired in a run-of-the-mill, unremarkable way and clearly no longer in use. Even its purpose is impossible to identify: a former agricultural building, or a one-time small workshop? He stops directly in front of the building and points to the ground. It is only as I am standing right next to him that I am surprised by an entrance that drops sharply to a cellar below, unsafe, with no hand rail, the door wide open and windows smashed. I suddenly recognize the motif of the painting Le point d’eau (The Standpipe, 2008). Suddenly appearing, as if out of nowhere, the picture stands before me and matches the banality of the location. Of course Le point d’eau only achieves its drama from the figure hanging precariously above the abyss and the tangled mass of hands and arms adds to this effect, but the vision of this painting found its starting point here; this is its naturally evolved “setting.” It is astonishing to see how well the painted image captures the reality of the location while transporting it to a completely different world in which dreamlike qualities and melancholy merge along with romantic and existential sensibilities. You do indeed get a clear sense of it on location, but it is much more diffuse because there are far more things around you that interfere with your concentration on this one view. On the way back to the studio, we pass a turning that we last took in October 2008, when we parked the car on a nearby road, seeking out a rarely visited building, half-hidden by a cluster of trees and renovated to serve unknown purposes. As the crow flies, this place is no more than one kilometer away from the cellar entrance we have just visited. Close to this curious building, Rabus showed me another small house, half-overgrown by brambles, where mattresses and detritus indicated fleeting overnight stays. There was the smell of something stale and rotten fermenting sweetly in the halflight of the room. Who last spent the night here? What happened? What were the thoughts of those who stayed here? These are the burning questions that cross your mind. This place has something of a morbid persistence even, as time is trapped, forgotten and finally lost in this tangle of thorns. And yet he always remains unmoved by the heaviness and fragility of such places, accepting them as gifts with his own habitual brightness and enthusiasm. This is no melancholy artist turning in on himself; quite the contrary, his light, almost childlike optimism stands out against the disturbing strangeness of the locations.

The works of Léopold Rabus are essentially paintings, also creations using hair, as well as several videos. It is difficult to classify Rabus in the often-accepted contemporary landscape, as he makes light of unexpected traditions and techniques to create a remarkable cosmos both disturbing and seductive.

Léopold Rabus disorientates the observer by the appearance of his works whose techniques are so traditional but whose subjects are so unusual. In great part, his opuses are oil paintings and sometimes waxed-paintings. His explicit references, from a formal point of view, are those of great paintings. He has an unlimited admiration for Ingres, Goya and the Pre-Raphaelites. At a moment in which misinformed, but highly publicized, critics denounce the “gassing of artwork” and the supposed disappearance of “art’s embodiment”, Léopold Rabus produces oils on canvas in a purely classical style.

Léopold Rabus paints what seem to be deformed human beings, evolving in a world of multiple perspectives, in a décor out of space and time. The characters, who at first appear rather macabre, always seem tensed and in pain, frozen in uncomfortable positions. Léopold Rabus is not the first artist to so deform the human body and face. Goya (one thinks of “Saturne dévorant ses enfants” 1824 [Saturn devouring his children]; “Le temps ou les vieilles” 1812 [Time or the old ones] and “Caprices” [Whims]), Schiele or Francis Bacon have chosen as subjects the deformations of the body and their representation, both magnificent and morbid.

As do these latter, Rabus uses precision and virtuosity in his technique that has a devastating effect on the spectator’s sensibility. Paintings also can be scary. The paintings of Léopold Rabus nevertheless do not represent scenes of war, of death or of disturbing crimes, but rather characters recalled by the artist or gleaned in family photo albums (sometimes unknown). Léopold Rabus proposes work essentially based on memory (his or not), with his capacity for suggesting pictures almost at random in an original manner, sometimes absurd but always stricking. Dreams are a good example of this involuntary memory. In this way, Léopold Rabus uses dreams as tools and delights in representing along with the body of a deformed dwarf (or what seems to be) that he had seen in his youth, the Polaroid snapshot of one of his friends’ son. Or again, fascinated by Swiss forests, he includes in snowy landscapes a minimal backdrop of mushrooms. The closest thing to this method is surely that of Proust, deciphering the psychology and the patchwork that represent our thoughts inundated by memories. But Léopold Rabus carries the analysis all the way to the scalpel.

As it did with Francis Bacon, using pictures of Muybridge, it is the position of the body that matters. Remember Bacon, speaking of the disturbing and stretched mouth of the pope inspired from Velasquez, saying he’d only wanted to paint a smile. Léopold Rabus has no desire to shock or horrify. But his pictures are for sure those of monsters. Literally, a monster is made up of various parts of humans and or animals (Descartes / Bosch). In his “Meditations” Descartes comments already on the fact that the imagination proceeds by combinations and never from “ex-nihilo” creation (out of nothing). Therefore the monstrous beings created by Léopold Rabus are explicitly humans or animals, but their eyes, rolling upwards, their complexion, their dislocated positions prove they are neither normal nor tranquil.

This gap created by Rabus creates a perverse form of attraction towards these creatures. The seduction wielded by monsters is a known fact : Hieronymus Bosch was probably the first to use it, but one also thinks of Pat Andréa or of the horror movies (“Freaks” by Todd Browning, “Elephant Man” by David Lynch). All in all there is a real attraction only in a certain repulsion, a paradox largely exploited here. This magnitude both in the classism of his style (notably the precision of his technique) and in the actual manner of his work, establish a link between him and the artist Béatrice Cussol.

Another important point is the presence of natural elements or animals. Following the great pictorial tradition, Rabus incorporates landscape elements or parts of still-lives in his compositions (notably mushrooms or forests). Faithful to his style, the artist uses them in an exaggerated manner (such as giant mushrooms) with allusions borrowed from the cinema or from photography (exaggerated and deforming plunging views). His love of nature includes the natural aspects of the human body. He uses for example real hair in the compositions under glass in which he mixes paint and braids of human hair. The piece then becomes some sort of ex-voto (offering given in order to fulfill a vow). This type of work has existed for centuries in numerous traditions and regional folklore. Naturally, Death lurks near these pieces made of the strangest body part, the hair, which last longer than the flesh and, it is said, can even keep growing for several weeks on a cadaver.

But above all one must be aware of the derision and irony contained without a doubt in every one of his pieces. The process becomes clear in the video “L’eau du Guide” in which Léopold Rabus has chosen to show chickens following a prophetic guide, half religious, half Zarathousta. The story is told by a voice off-screen, that of a chicken, recounting her irrational attraction to a spiritual guide with long hair. One can only admire the beauty of the scenery, the talent used to write the texts and to film the video. Nevertheless, Léopold Rabus refuses a parody and treats it systematically like an imaginary story. This brings to mind the philosophical process used in the Monty Python “The Meaning of Life”, treating the most metaphysical subjects with a certain humor.

In his video, Léopold Rabus chooses to depict the attraction that gurus of all types can have and to inverse the roles by putting chickens in the place of the gullible faithful. Crowd scenes, seductions and persuasions, the suicide of a follower; the important elements are not far behind the mockery, the beauty of the background or of the chickens.

© Sébastien Planas, directeur des Collections de Saint Cyprien
sebastien.planas@collectionsdesaintcyprien.com



 

The pictorial worlds of young Swiss artist Léopold Rabus (*1977, Neuenburg / Switzerland) defy any clear definition. He plays with clichés, with symbols and well-known motives, alters them or assigns them a new meaning. His thematic series engage in aspects of good and bad, of religion and sexuality, life and death, themes that come to be satirised by the shrill colouring, the particular materials and the extraordinary luminance of the paintings.

The series „Ex-Voto“, whose title refers to the tradition of votive pictures dating back to late medieval Italy, depicts this persiflage especially well. Rabus seizes this tradition with all its iconographic categories and renders it absurd. Behind the sweet façade of shimmering colours the protagonists’ quibbling meanness reveals. The spectator stands before Rabus’ votives with mixed emotions between fascination and disgust. With the use of real dark hair, the surface of the painting receives a haptic quality that stands in harsh contradiction to the glittering colour of nail polish. Together with the empty eyes and enormous heads reminding of children’s drawings, it evokes very ambivalent feelings – intuitive, unsettling and in a way not of this world.

A similarly idiosyncratic iconography unfolds in the series „Scène Sainte” from 2004. “I try to capture the very moment when the soul – voluntarily or not – leaves the body”, Rabus notes on these works. Returning motives conjure in their different contexts a novel semiotic that abates over usual connotation like a veil. Whilst winged fawns whir around devoured anemones in one painting, they are gorged in the next or drink out of the sacred tears of those left behind in yet another. The fairytale world from untroubled childhood years is broken, the idyll destroyed. As in the earlier series, the cheerful colours of the lovingly patterned clothes deceive the pictures’ philosophical-religious content and thereby quip on their own message: “The Man lives on his knees, condemns or praises god, a tree, a bottle, before finally laying down to his last rest: A lowly way of addressing what he does not understand” (Rabus).

The subtle irony with which Léopold Rabus covers exaggerated devotion is taken to culmination in his video “L’Eau du Guide” (“the leader’s water”), in which a preacher explains the beauty of nature to a herd of chicken in order to illuminate their souls. He carries this motive to the extremes and erects a shrine for the leader: In a frosted gingerbread house adorned with marzipan piglets he gathers the (stuffed) chicken around a fairy-light-draped devotion picture lined with landscape photos strongly reminding of postcards (Maison Pain, 2004)

In his latest works, the mass of information is reduced and the action presented in clear but no less complex constellations. The balanced compositions whisk away the viewer to a world of insect-like meandering bodies appearing both fragile and menacing in their scarce garment.

The young artist’s unmistakeable style, his manner of combining the aesthetic with the abysmal, the carnal with the ulterior, his unfolding of twilight worlds filled with fantasy and ambiguity, the energy and forcefulness of his paintings bestow his works with a vibrancy whose impact one can hardly elude. Léopold Rabus does not reinvent painting - he draws on the plentiful resources of its glorious past and makes the viewer experience why painting will never be dead.

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