In her drawings and installations, Marisa Rappard (1979) investigates intuitively what it means to be human in our current, fluid world, in which technology intervenes lives, contact is ephemeral and overwhelming amounts of information flow past daily.
Rappard is interested in how man places it’s hope in technology and confers it almost religious or transcendent characteristics, while at the same time this technology clearly has a most alarming downside.
The figures in her drawings wander lonely through dense abstract structures and anonymous rooms, resembling a hall of mirrors. Iterations of reflections, silhouettes and shadow figures make it difficult to distinguish which is the true self.
People are surrounded by colourful streams of lines, from which they emerge and in which they are absorbed. It is ambiguous whether man finds redemption in these abstract floods of comforting colours or rather disintegrates within them.
Rappard continously navigates between abstraction and figuration. Mixing the recognisable with the inrecognisable she expresses how hard it is nowadays to get grip on things and distinguish what is true. She switches abruptly between confusing perspectives. This play with perspective may even continue beyond the drawing on paper: her lines also enter the room in wall-filling works, spatial drawings and installations. Thus, as a viewer, you are immersed and become part of the work, experiencing the impossibility to absorb all information at the same time, the fluidity of different perspectives, connections that shift upon changing your position.
Marisa Rappard’s work is well represented in Centraal Museum’s drawing collection, as well as in the UMC collection, NOG/Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Boijmans van Beuningen museum and many private collections. Rappard is represented by Cokkie Snoei in Rotterdam.
‘Marisa Rappard’s work takes in an exceptional place within contemporary drawing – not only because of her authentic handwriting and her preference for the use of colour. Another captivating aspect of her work is that creating an image on a modest piece of paper does not suffice to her. Using paper and thin wooden sticks she is able to create installations raising the question as to what is a drawing. Her lines keep pulling me in, making me ’hop’ from the installations to the large drawings and zooming in on the small works. With relatively simple means she creates a world that keeps surprising me. Drawing coloured lines that keep continuing she shakes off every convention and submits herself completely to her work, work that questions her, work that escalates and literally enters the room, work that keeps astounding me.’
excerpts from Arno Kramer, ‘A search’ Mr. Motley magazine 2016
‘Inconceivably, Marisa Rappard has managed to combine large amounts of drawings in all sorts of sizes into a structured chaos: a chaos inviting you to come closer and lose yourself further ever more, since between all of those lines occasionally a fragment of a story appears – and another one, and anonther one.’
excerpt from Jantine Kremer, ‘Zooming in and out’ on the exhibition ‘Traces of Infinity’ at Centraal Museum Utrecht, Lucy magazine 2016