Raphy, from dream to reality

 

When I discovered Raphy's creations during the summer of 84, I was already overwhelmed by the poetic power of color tonality.

 

My gaze having gradually opened up to contemporary creation, I therefore had the privilege of meeting the master in his studio in La Baule on a Sunday in May 92. I was touched by the humility of this artist and by his passionate interest in all forms of artistic expression of thought.

 

We had a long conversation on the history of contemporary art by multiplying the essential landmarks which are at the base of the plastic and graphic evolution of these last hundred years: Eternal debate between formal and spiritual, Duchamp and Beuys, impressionism and expressionism, cubism and constructivism… Generating artist and catalyst of suffering…

Raphy is above all our magician of oz, the painter of lights and transparencies brilliantly combining the colors of all the rainbows on earth. He is life itself and his creation is imbued with an extraordinary emotional talent.

 

Between abstraction, freedom, resurrection, he reveals to us the sacred meaning of existence.

Beyond my first impressions I sought to better understand the progress of this exceptional artist to analyze his work which is worthy of all the interests and all the plastic researches.

To understand Raphy is not to ignore his wounds so as not to hide in the history of humanity the memory of a people mutilated and decimated by the cruelty of men.

 

Raphy or the recognition of Armenia, crossing the difficult years until the culmination of a rich and inhabited pictorial work of All the Torments but also of all the joys of the existence.

 

To love Raphy's painting is to love life in its absolute magnificence.

Raphy is not a sad man, his creation is above all a hymn to rediscovered joy. It is the image of beauty exploded in a multitude of chromatic landscapes sublimated by the reborn lyricism of color.

 

He is the great conductor who organizes the space of his canvases in a ballet and a symphony of scrolls, of geometric elements sprinkled with a visionary light bathed in an eloquent and sublime rhythm.

The Work often refers to the upheavals of our existence and to the earthly phenomena that dress our daily lives.

In this waltz of solitude where the blue color of the ocean tears the canvas in a burst of melancholy indigo, Raphy opens the way to passion for us thanks to a creation mastered and executed with absolute precision and permanent rigor.

 

Raphy or the vision of a sudden apocalypse between rebirth and an idealized cosmos constantly transfigured by the gem of a surprising imagination.

The painter often used to take up his old canvases to give them a new emotion, each time reaching the paroxysm of perfection.

 

In this astonishing whirlwind of light or the abstraction of geometric shapes in motion, I contemplate the work of this artist who invites me to an infinite quest for spirituality and meditation constantly renewed. It would take a lot of artistic bad faith not to recognize the genius, the talent, the total harmony obtained in the work and the organization of the forms that appear to us in a play of primary colors.

 

The man of great generosity infuses his work with broad mystical connotations that reinforce his formal search for a spiritual ideal dominated by the Catholic religion. Raphy, or the miracle of life, of resurrection, dominant themes in Christianity...

 

He spoke to me at length about the affective and emotive power of music, which emerges as a leitmotif and as obvious in view of his works.

There is no finer tribute than this “Ghost Ship” so dear to Richard Wagner. We can imagine Raphy decorating the theater of Bayreuth* in a requiem of colors and allegories to the glory of its genius creator.

 

In search of this lost time immortalized by Marcel Proust, nostalgia for the Orient is no longer what it was and the stigmata of exile travel through Raphy's thought and creation._cc781905-5cde-3194- bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ Could painting be an outlet for awakening the feelings of a bygone past? In this no man's land of indifference where the sublime rubs shoulders with the reality of life, the artist weaves the sonic web of our sufferings, our dreams but also our hopes. This is Raphy's magnificent message.

 

Raphy tells me about Cézanne, Kandinsky, Chagall, his teacher and master Adam… In my eyes, he is the worthy successor of these major artists of the 20th century.

The theme of the bird, the only figurative element of the abstract compositions, would be the only link between our chaotic world, torn apart by violence, and the paradise of this artist.

To live, but to live to love color in this poetic litany where the creation of this exceptional man opens the doors of life and the pages of a philosophical and universal thought to us in a surge of love haloed by the magic of a cry of hope.

 

“Be the master and the sculptor of yourself” as Nietsche said so well, I would say that talent cannot be invented and that everything is a question of love and work.

 

  

* Bayreuth, German city in Bavaria where Richard Wagner had a theater built (the Festspielhaus, financed by Louis II of Bavaria) intended to represent only HIS OPERAS.

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Christophe GALARD

Excerpts from his thesis on contemporary art - May 30, 1992

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