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.


In the Nowhere
It is these once vibrant, now deserted places, left behind by our globalized times, that hold a magic attraction for the artist. Where other working artists find fulfillment in the world metropolises or head for increasingly remote locations to seek out weird and wonderful sources of inspiration, Rabus focuses on the decrepit, forgotten, and unspectacular places on his doorstep—so shamefully close, in fact, that it is almost as if he is breaking a taboo by daring to take such images for inspiration. Is this really how it is? Is it possible that the source of this brilliant artistic statement is literally next door to the studio, right under our noses, unnoticed all these years? Few tears will be shed, and not so much as a thought will be wasted, on these abandoned huts, old fences, and discarded agricultural tools, long forgotten on Jura’s slopes. They are unusable, with no material value, and remain where they were left only because it would take too much money and effort to remove them. So here they lie, as defiant ciphers for another time, strewn all over the countryside, if you have an eye for them. There is nothing unusual, striking, or valuable about these things: just irrefutable evidence of man’s imprint on the land, his attempt to take nourishment from the soil. But the memory of these toils have long since faded; those people are either no longer with us or they are as old as the hills, and all that remains is exposed to the elements, a silent shadow of its former self, little more than a dark, temporary refuge, for night time vagrants and forbidden love.


Drama
Since 2005, there has been an increasing focus on the countryside around Corcelles, close to Neuchâtel, in the paintings. Rabus is treading familiar territory here, the land of his youth. Always with a camera in hand, he captures whatever arouses his interest, whether it’s a derelict building, trampled-down grass, dead animals, or the glowing evening sky. This has resulted in a rich collection of prints of color photos in hardcopy format, taken over the years—carefully sorted according to motif—and stored in the studio so that the artist has them close to hand. He constantly enhances this huge body of material, with photos from magazines and books. Rabus begins his paintings with a clear idea of content and motif, based on personal experience. He derives the composition and combination of the figures and objects from the photos. He uses a projector to cast these images onto the prepared canvas, combining completely disparate photographs, populating backdrops with figures, animals, and
objects from different spatial and temporal contexts. Léopold Rabus is interested in neither a topographical recognition factor, nor recreating an actual encounter in the woods. It is not the landscape that forms his theme, but rather something that could potentially take place out there, something imagined by the onlooker as we experience his paintings. In this sense, the landscape is the stage upon which paradoxical human constellations develop and bizarre dramas unfold, as in Scène d’alpage (Alpine Scene, 2008), where entangled characters make their way to a mysterious pit dwelling. Although the artist employs contemporary techniques by using photos to create the picture’s reality, he still takes the form in a new artistic direction by confronting his figures with the absurdity of the chaos around them. At a first fleeting glance, the figures unsettle the onlooker with their drastic edginess. But on a second look, unimagined psychological depths become apparent and old, artistic concepts suddenly resurface, lending renewed impact to contemporary art’s well-worn themes. There is something dramatically symphonic about these pictures. They seem to belong to another unreal world, and yet they are imbued with the original motifs of banal village life. Indeed one of the great surprises of this art is that such grand opera emerges out of such modesty. An explosive mixture of romance and the unfathomable, of bright scurrility and religious fervor, streams out of these pictures, calling forth an unreal, dreamlike occurrence like some ethereal balloon, rising up into a time that flickers nervously and is measured in global beats.


Is this Fate?
Léopold Rabus discovers this striking cast of bizarre characters in his immediate surroundings. He has a natural ability to accentuate the scurrilous and the strange by virtuoso caricaturelike exaggerations of certain physical characteristics. But these things really exist: real-life models in the neighborhood, in the village,met in chance encounters in the woods, or sometimes in magazines and books from the previous century.
The quality that typically unites them is aptly described by the Swiss word “verschupft,” which roughly translates as disregarded, neglected, which is why the subjects seem slightly out-of-sorts or apprehensive. They are, in fact, just people like you and me, but they seem to bear their cross more visibly than the rest of us and certainly don’t match up to the image of beauty, youth, wealth, and trend urbanity that is much loved in the world of advertising. We cannot expect the people portrayed
in these paintings to make an impression on the world, perhaps not even on their own village. They do however share a common characteristic that is becoming rare amidst the sameness of our globalized life: non-conformity. Or to put it the other way around: Rabus shows us truly original characters, who are looking for soul mates, who are just themselves, with no need to pursue media-created role models. This is particularly true of the male figures. By contrast, and particularly in the earlier paintings, the female characters that appear frequently have the look of Anna Hirsch. The often-wet hair, the striking, almost deathlike pallor of complexion and the reduced perspective all make for a textbook femme fatale figure. We are never really sure what they’re up to: whether they have set a trap, whether they want to poison or murder someone, or whether, on the contrary, they have seduction in mind. Anything is possible and they would relish whatever comes to pass. A suggestive, almost fateful figure, embodying life and death like no other. At once a good and a dark angel. When Rabus confronts us with the prematurely old and the dull-witted, the simpleton and the mildly disabled, the precocious and the wicked, he is not reverting to the 1968 generation’s reflex of moral outrage, but rather he is accentuating the caricature, which is why these figures attract our attention and sometimes even lead us to delight in their misery. And yet, despite our amusement, we are aware of their involvement in the events taking place and we understand the clumsiness of their attempts to master the situation. At this point at the very latest, we discover ourselves at last, failing in similar circumstances, making the same bungling attempts and leaving nothing but confusion in our wake. He first amuses us, placing us above these people and creating the impression of distance from these doomed figures, only to cast us deep into the abyss of human existence in the next instant, with no safety net or escape hatch. As we begin our descent, amusement turns to fear and horror. The figures in the paintings are subject to elemental forces, which from the very beginnings of time have brought pleasure and pain, joy and fear to people in equal measure, with the wheel of time spinning on, from one generation to the next. This animalistic energy is an archaic force that we cannot resist, because it necessarily pursues its own survival instinct. It is chemical and psychological, hormonal and genetic and it bestrides the great stage of human misery and happiness. What is at its core? Violence and the fight for survival, hunger and nourishment, love and sexual desire, destruction and despair, killing and murder, birth and redemption, good and evil. The great stage. And all those disregarded figures in its midst. No heroes, not a single one. No one with whom we can identify, or from whom we can learn lessons. Instead, the fantastic, somnambulant human drama rises before us, materially and psychologically trapped by the garden gate, the dead fox, the used mattress, the whole world. The people are human flotsam, bravely toiling, trying to escape their menacing fate. But they are hampered by their own shortcomings and weaknesses, all their efforts in vain. They are the victims of ill fate, striving like Sisyphus to master misfortune and triumph in adversity (as in Personnes déplaçant un matelas [People Moving a Mattress], 2009). But they are unable to resolve their situation, no solution is found, no decision reached. Mischief matures into genuine disaster, tension remains, confusion and entanglement. The sad figures have taken the wrong path, fading away into the landscape around them.


It’s Getting Dark
Although or perhaps because Léopold Rabus uses fashion and hair style to give his characters something of the nostalgic charm of bygone ages of the twentieth century, he also frees his people from a clearly identifiable temporal context, imposing a strangely floating timelessness upon them. This effect is heightened by the technical virtuosity of his painting, a simultaneously soft and edgy naturalism, a fascinating, darktoned feeling reminiscent of the old masters. This unexpected echo harks back to distant ages in the history of painting. This is particularly true of the new paintings since 2008, which often reach enormous dimensions. But what is the significance of the old masters in contemporary art? An anachronism, the breaking of a taboo, a crash to earth, the negation of modern art even? Where does Rabus’s naturalism come from, and is that really what it is? These are difficult questions. Of course this artist is not painting in the style of Matthias Grünewald or Hieronymus Bosch, Johann Heinrich Füssli or Arnold Böcklin. But like those greats he is on the trail of the magical mystery of physical transformation. Why is flesh made bread, a woman made a demon, a night time island transformed into a realm of the dead? Beyond these mysteries, we can sometimes find traces of religion in the Rabus’s work. They are not primarily expressed in Christian motifs, but, for instance, in the way natural light modulates dark-toned landscapes, or in the fragility of human existence. Sometimes moods of intangible, fatalistic romanticism and religion arise, also holding a hint of magic within them. It is as if the pictures have a tale to tell of a past time, there is a mixture—as with a story passed on by word of mouth—of reality and legend, supposition and imagination. Instead of approaching his themes rationally, he prefers intuitive proximity to the folk tradition, to the feelings and beliefs of the figures in his paintings, the people of his village environment. This is reflected in many other works, such as in the installation Arc-en-foin (Hay Bow, 2008,) or in the video L’eau du guide (The Water of the Guide, 2004). Rabus manages to show perfect empathy with the states of mind, opinions, and fears of these characters. The customs and traditions that have developed in the course of history, the old stories passed on by word of mouth, the social and religious overtones, combine with the landscapes and animals to form the inspiration for his work. Beyond the trendy superficiality of the media-obsessed age, the artist visits old established modes of behavior, subjective reckonings and opinions—especially if they tend toward the absurd and the fantastical—and finds an archaic energy that is a major driving force behind his work. He does not shrink away from the inelegant or the unfavorable, he listens to his characters with sympathy and delight, a feature of his art and indispensable to an understanding of his painting. It is impossible to imagine Rabus without Corcelles. This place represents the world. Corcelles is everywhere.
The complete pictures are not, strictly speaking, always painted in the naturalistic style. Only small areas display a realistic sharpness, with far larger portions of the paintings involving an astonishingly abstract approach, and it is only from a certain distance that the objective arrangement can be ascertained (for instance, Personnes derrière une serre [People behind a Greenhouse], 2009). This is how Rabus emphasizes the areas that are of particular importance to him. Equally, the difference
between precision and letting go results in a suggestive, almost stagelike drama. The events of the picture seem to come from a camera’s perspective: the perspective zooms in on one area, only to leave another out of focus. And suddenly the relationships with the Christian motifs of the Renaissance and the Baroque become apparent: the altar tables of those times were painted with a very specific location in mind. Viewed from close range, which wasn’t the original intention, it is astonishing to see how flat and blurred large sections of the picture are.


Growing Crooked
If we compare the most recent, dark-toned pictures with those of 2005, it is apparent that events have now shifted from the figures to the landscape: instead of outsized people, borrowed from the world of comics, Rabus makes the expansiveness and isolation of the landscape his central motif. The figures are integrated into the land and sometimes seem to grow into it. If the people populating the earlier paintings were mainly found indoors, at home or in the interiors of agricultural buildings, they are now outside and fully exposed to the elements. If the people previously seemed incomparably monstrous, powerful, and dangerous, now their fragility and vulnerability come to the fore. The essentially more colorful and caricaturelike portraits have given way to a physical and spiritual vulnerability. The existential aspect was always important in his work, but it has become more tactile and penetrating. Still, this is not to say that the paintings are automatically more melancholy because the exaggeration introduces a scurrilous element, so that we stand back incredulously and think: that’s not possible. How can that be? By considerably overstating experienced reality, he hints that the real world is not quite so terrible after all. It even has something reassuring about it. Those who look deeply into the paintings will be spared none of the lows, but precisely because of this they return to everyday life with a strange sense of reassurance. In the paintings from 2005, the artist used three striking stylistic techniques that significantly contribute to the drawing of the figures as monstrous, sinister caricatures, something that is very evident in La maison des oiseaux (The House of Birds, 2005), for instance. (1) The heads are disproportionately large compared to the bodies. (2) The heads are sometimes viewed from above in an extremely reduced perspective. (3) The pupils often appear white, creating the impression of completely contorted eyes. Added to this, the people frequently appear with ashen skin and faces, looking more dead than alive. But even in these early paintings, some of the figures are so embroiled in each other that it is all but impossible to disentangle them and keep them apart. La bergère et le bucheron (The Shepherd and the Lumberjack, 2006) provides an example of this. Who is sawing off whose hand? How many individuals are involved here? Or is this a scene from a film? The same principle of composition can be seen in the painting Dans une grange au Valais (In a Barn in Valais, 2006). If we compare these paintings to the contemporary ones, it becomes clear that Rabus had tried and tested crucial, formal methods more than five years ago. But what is the effect of this interweaving of the characters? And why is this tangle of limbs so contorted as to make just looking at it a painful experience? The bending and intertwining are radical ways of highlighting the affected characters, to show how human nature is imbued with archaic drives on the one hand and delicate shortcomings on the other. To a certain degree, Rabus strips away the thin skin of civilization and exposes the nefarious and instinct-driven forces beneath our learned politeness and consideration. However—and this is a crucial point—the dark side of human nature not only comes in the form of a murderous assault, but is constantly coupled with the weak, clumsy and precocious gesture of the protagonists. An artist like Rabus could doubtless paint in a far more brutal way. Despite the extreme monstrosity of his chosen tools, it is this coupling of dull malignance with latent learning impairment, sexual voracity with embarrassing fussiness that creates the humanity of his painting. He neither uses the dull-witted for pure amusement nor revels in the sheer excess of violence. By skillfully interlocking the almost complementary emotional worlds, he has discovered a technique that is not only of rare uniqueness in contemporary art, but also opens a vast thematic spectrum for the future.


Don’tTalk, Paint
But what is the relationship between Léopold Rabus’s position regarding art from the last century and contemporary art? First, two important traditions need to be considered: the sharp, detailed verism of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), as was developed in the 1920s with a particularly body-conscious emphasis by Otto Dix and George Grosz, for instance. And the compositional principles of Surrealism, whose aim was to nullify rational control and, instead, infuse the understanding of the paintings with the forces of the unknown as a creative energy. The different realistic and photorealistic tendencies around 1970, such as those associated with Johannes Grützke or Franz Gertsch, can be localized as the missing link between them as critical reflections on the incrustations of that time’s society. However, verism and many realistic tendencies were mainly preoccupied with using grotesque forms of exaggeration to denounce society’s inequities and raise public awareness. Rabus, on the other hand, has no such political or social agenda. His painting is not politically motivated. And it is only when he fuses disconnected objects into paradox conglomerates that his painting can be considered in any way surreal. The backdrop to the process of creation and execution in the painting is one of definite control. It would not be possible any other way. In order to understand his paintings, it is therefore essential to clarify these historical positions very precisely. Like almost all his contemporaries in art, he does not imagine he can or must seek to change the world through art. His paintings have no missionary aim to persuade, but seek the onlooker’s participation: the drastic element and the drama aim to draw the onlookers straight into the events of the painting, making them, as it were, a part of the bizarre entanglement and interrelationships. Unlike abstract contemporary positions, such as those taken by Bernard Frize, Katharina Grosse, Lori Hersberger, Renée Levi, or Christine Streuli, Rabus is uninterested in artistic self-referencing or ornamental questioning. Rather, it is the expansive excesses, the demolition of familiar, manageable picture formats that provide a comparable category. Looking at contemporary Swiss art, it is clear that he has no interest in the conceptual approaches of a Mario Sala or a Christian Vetter. In the face of this complexity bordering on the discursive, Rabus offers the crooked figures and agricultural remains of his region, with an unerring feel for the great themes between romantic hope and fatalistic perdition. His paintings are comparable with the work of Klodin Erb in this respect, and in his occasional revisiting of bygone times. Although Klodin Erb’s characters are mainly found in interior settings, their multiple personalities and fragility occupy territory that is not wholly unfamiliar to the work of Rabus. Looking at the developments of the Neue Leipziger Schule (New Leipzig School) in Germany in recent years, there are clear points of comparison despite all the fundamental differences: the melancholy and isolation in the characters of Tim Eitel, the collective experience of the most recent past in the decrepit interiors of condemned buildings in the works of Matthias Weischer, and the almost fairytale, mythical constructions of Neo Rauch’s great world theater. Where Daniel Richter shows great gestural verve and social sensibility in capturing contemporary scenes of perdition on the largescale canvas, Rabus places events in a context that transcends time and twists them into something scurrilous. On the other hand, both painters are masters at dramatizing events. The bizarre asceticism provides a link to the lonely, ravaged figures of Norbert Schwontkowski, although his visual world is characterized by a sketchy, floating dreaminess, which clearly sets it apart from the world of Rabus. More points of reference could be found despite the obvious differences. But these fragmentary comparisons themselves show Rabus’s unmistakable independence. If we take a moment to look back on his earliest artistic beginnings in 2003, which had their origins in the stylizing reduction and dramatic intensification of comics, the breathtakingly fast development of his artistic work is both clear and remarkable. In little more than six years, the artist leaves behind a closeness to the world of comics that is common to his generation. In its place, he discovers an independent visual language that allows him to tackle the great issues of human existence and to place them in a credible modern context. Clearly, the great stage contains many pitfalls. But Rabus instinctively knows that these issues need to be grounded and the surprising intermeshing of monstrosity and perdition that characterizes his figures are the qualities that lend real stature to his art. He never shies away from risk, wastes no time on the current preferences of the art business, and holds true to his personal
convictions. We can look forward with eager anticipation to the next turn his work takes. One thing is clear: those who find only morbidity and revulsion in Léopold Rabus have failed to recognize the potential of his art. For it is beyond these aspects that the artist is able to orchestrate his characters in ways that elevate our contemporary human condition, placing it in a vast and timeless context.



1 From Franz Böni, Ein Wanderer im Alpenregen. Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1979), p. 9f. In eight short stories, Franz Böni (born in 1952 in interthur) tells of the privation suffered by various outsiders, loners, and laborers who get no breaks from life. Perceptions bordering on the extrasensory meet with the adversity of nature and cannot be rationalized by the protagonists. On the contrary: we see them in their elemental terror, completely at the mercy of these hostile apparitions.

2 Léopold Rabus mentions his preference for surrealistic composition procedures and cites Cadavre exquis (Exquisite Corpse) as an example. André Breton defines this method as follows: “A game with folded paper, the object of which is to construct a sentence or an illustration by several people, with the players unaware of what has been created immediately before.” As with Ecriture automatique (automatic writing), Cadavre exquis serves to nullify rational controls, to facilitate the imaginings of the unknowing. (Conversation with the artist on October 9, 2008 in the studio at Corcelles-Cormondrèche.)

3 Léopold Rabus describes his taste for the Middle Ages, for Gothic cathedrals, for Matthias Grünewald and Hans Holbein: “I don’t understand the biblical texts, but in my paintings there is a certain religious and romantic feeling.” (In conversation with the author on March 19, 2009 in the studio in Corcelles- Cormondrèche.)

4 Léopold Rabus derived the two protagonists of this painting from old magazines. However, the subject is of dead people lying on the ground in a criminal context. The night scene in the corner of the old conservatory can be traced back to an actual meeting.

5 When asked whether his paintings were evil, Rabus replied by saying that all human impulses were contained in them, irrespective of whether one would like to categorize them as good or evil. (In conversation with the author on March 19, 2009 in the studio in Corcelles-Cormondrèche.)

6 Cf. Léopold Rabus, Paintings 2003–2004 (n.p., 2004). In this, Léopold Rabus writes two pointed sentences that pre-empt the existential themes of his later large-scale paintings: “The most beautiful flowers feed on humus, death and soil. Our souls fly off and our hair continues to grow in the earth, amongst the roots, life continues, it never stops.” Ibid., unpaginated.
 

Text by Markus Stegmann
Markus Stegmann’s text was originally written in German.