Raphael Egil
Readers
December 2022 - February 2023
Cassius & Co.
Extract ---
In his 1975 essay, The Pleasure of the Text, French philosopher Roland Barthes problematizes the author-centric view we have of literature. Instead, he writes a poetics of the reader, recognising the power of their pleasure to shape and form the lived reality of texts. With characteristically lyrical prose, Barthes suggests that there is not, behind the text, someone active (the writer), and out front someone passive (the reader). Here, books are not static and immovable, but subject to change as readers devour, gobble, and graze their way through words to produce living, amorphous, bodies of work that are ultimately the result of a negotiation between writer and reader.
Perhaps this is what Swiss painter Raphael Egil means when he tells me he reads his sitters, instead of paints them. Speaking over facetime from his studio in Lucerne, Switzerland, Egil describes a quiet scepticism of realism: he describes his portraits as closer to language than photography. Instead, Egil likes to ‘take signs’ out of his sitters, transforming his portraits into ‘visual poems’.
As we talk, the paintings are still in his studio, hung in salon formation. It is the first time Raphael Egil has formally ventured into portraiture, and the works retain all the depth, symbolism, and ambition of his wider oeuvre. At various different scales, the artist describes how his paintings are typically made with speed and immediacy over the course of a coffee and a conversation. They depict a broad range of sitters, taking on the presence of an unlikely school class: some are friends, acquaintances, colleagues, others are famous literary figures, fictitious, or entirely imagined. All are made up of two composite layers: the first a paint wash, the second direct and fast detailing. All bear signs of readerly negotiation, operating somewhere between mimesis and abstraction, presence and absence.
In situ
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Portrait, 2022
Raphael Egil
Extract ---
In his 1975 essay, The Pleasure of the Text, French philosopher Roland Barthes problematizes the author-centric view we have of literature. Instead, he writes a poetics of the reader, recognising the power of their pleasure to shape and form the lived reality of texts. With characteristically lyrical prose, Barthes suggests that there is not, behind the text, someone active (the writer), and out front someone passive (the reader). Here, books are not static and immovable, but subject to change as readers devour, gobble, and graze their way through words to produce living, amorphous, bodies of work that are ultimately the result of a negotiation between writer and reader.
Perhaps this is what Swiss painter Raphael Egil means when he tells me he reads his sitters, instead of paints them. Speaking over facetime from his studio in Lucerne, Switzerland, Egil describes a quiet scepticism of realism: he describes his portraits as closer to language than photography. Instead, Egil likes to ‘take signs’ out of his sitters, transforming his portraits into ‘visual poems’.
As we talk, the paintings are still in his studio, hung in salon formation. It is the first time Raphael Egil has formally ventured into portraiture, and the works retain all the depth, symbolism, and ambition of his wider oeuvre. At various different scales, the artist describes how his paintings are typically made with speed and immediacy over the course of a coffee and a conversation. They depict a broad range of sitters, taking on the presence of an unlikely school class: some are friends, acquaintances, colleagues, others are famous literary figures, fictitious, or entirely imagined. All are made up of two composite layers: the first a paint wash, the second direct and fast detailing. All bear signs of readerly negotiation, operating somewhere between mimesis and abstraction, presence and absence.
In situ
Portrait, 2022
Raphael Egil