A city romance
Paintings by Liubov Rapoport is on display in Triptych Art Gallery
When ochre palette embraces Kyiv with the richness of its semitones, freely using the variety of tones, and the air becomes unbearably heady, with a bitter note of fading, you involuntarily plunge into memories. And, wandering along the streets you love, you catch yourself thinking that it has changed greatly, not for the best.
You feel especially nostalgic, when you get into the Triptych Art Gallery where the exhibit of Liubov Rapoport’s works, “Kyiv. Nineties” is on display. This is not simply “leaving nature.” Most of the places depicted on its cityscapes have been destroyed and ceased to exist.
“When I was painting them,” the artist writes in her book, I didn’t even think that the familiar houses and cozy yards and squares will be replaced by glass cylinders. The houses and yards disappear – together with the spirit of Kyiv.”
Liubov is a Kyivite, who inherited the rich painting traditions of her family and paints her native city in a “tasty,” generous, emotional way, not sparing the colors. And this fragile world is being mercilessly destroyed, for the sake of profit, lack of culture, and bad taste.
“Kyiv cityscapes (for the most part it is Podil District, where buildings are being ‘taunted’ by the city authorities),” says Doctor of Philosophy, art critic and artist Olha Petrova, “are living creatures in Liubov Rapoport’s interpretation. The cityscape is breathless because of pain, streets resist as if calling for help. Near the artist’s cityscapes you recall the words said by the founder of Washington Art Gallery Duncan Phillips about Chaim Soutine’s cityscapes, “They respond to the future catastrophe, as if they have a presentiment of the agony of our world, total war.” There is no doubt, expressionists Chaim Soutine and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner among others can be considered direct forerunners of Liubov Rapoport. And their closeness is not in stylistic succession; she came to the extraordinary modernist thinking earlier and in a more exact way than her young colleagues, foreboded the fractures, traumas, and transformations of the approaching ‘Chornobyl era.’”
Today, when the world is changing in a fast and terrible way, as well as the systems of interrelations inside of it, our personal integrity, our spiritual values, and real islets of Kyiv we love so much depend on our stand.
