This exhibition of works of the Parisian artist Naftali Rakuzin, his second solo project in Russia, combines paintings under the title of “Memorable Views / Postcards”. This cycle of paintings was created especially for the pop/off/art Gallery. In it there is a series of images of the sights of the world’s largest cities, connected with the life of the artist (Moscow, Jerusalem, Paris), but painted through the prism of the reproduction of their most well-known, clichéd, “postcard” points of view. They are simultaneously signs of memory and of “restoration”, the re-examination of the overused visual citations with the help of plastic means. Also the cycle includes a few canvases, dedicated to books connected with Russia, but published in various languages.

Looking at Rakuzin’s canvases, it is difficult to define their genre unequivocally. The principle “heroes” of his paintings are books, to which he has been faithful for a few decades, having found his unique method based on the representation of their spines or double-page spreads in the mid-seventies of the last century. Should they be called still-lifes? But the portrayed double-page spread, for example, of the album of Cezanne reproductions expands the customary scope of conventional terms: for Rakuzin they are obviously narrow. Clearly, it is simultaneously the artist’s reflection regarding landscape, and the issues of the reproduction of an image, and, finally, the fate of the painting. “Strictly speaking, as a genre, everything I do is still-life. But I prefer the English name of this genre – still-life, and not nature morte, that is calm, motionless nature, but not dead. But because a book is a universe, the whole world, a book on canvas is a window into this world. A window, through which I look at the world. If this window opens out onto a landscape, then the painting becomes a landscape. I do not make a “still-life with a book”, but a still-life in which the book is the main and sole hero and character”, says the artist. A view onto the world through the portrayal of a book: that is how Rakuzin’s modus vivendi in painting can be described.

At the same time, from the 14th of April to the 30th of June, Naftali Rakuzin’s graphic series, closely related to the paintings of “Memorable Views”, will be on show in the premises of Swedbank (48 Myasnitskaya Street) within the framework of the partnership programme of the bank and the pop/off/art Gallery.

The convergence of colour à la Falk, of “naturalness” to the point of “blende” and the dialogue of times – this is what the viewer, who avoids any “admixtures” in pure art, will see in the pop/off/art gallery.