A Love Like David Rappeneau's Drawings

It's been like a month since this exhibition closed but I still think this piece is pretty good. Here u go.

September 23, 2024

I want a love like David Rappeneau’s drawings. I think maybe we all do, and that’s the problem. Maybe that’s why love seems so hard to find these days. Or maybe Rappeneau is trying to tell us something about ourselves that we can only truly come to find reflected in his work. His work which leads us to the solution to one of the greatest troubles of this generation; how to better love each other, and ourselves by extension.

I only recently had the chance to see Rappeneau’s work in person for the first time at the opening for his newest solo exhibition, aptly titled ‘The Devil, Probably.’ Which was on view at the American Art Catalogues in the West Village of New York City until October 19th. 

I had never been to the gallery before but I knew I was at the right place when I came upon a large congregation of New York art student types, dressed in black, dappled in tattoos of varying size and quality, smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk and talking excitedly amongst themselves. A crowd much different than those who frequent the openings at David Zwirner or Gagosian in expensive suits and gowns, where you’ll surely spot a few gangly art students in the crowd but they’re never the majority. Except here they were, as they are for many of the openings for artists whose careers have been born out of social media. 

And while there are many young artists who have broken into the upper echelons on the industry without much of a social media presence, Rappeneau’s Instagram account, @Mitsubishi_ufj_financial_group, stands at just over 70,000 followers. Judging from the crowd present at his opening, which was primarily advertised on his social media account, this is how many of us came to find his work. 

That being said, Instagram wasn’t the only factor that contributed to the turnout of the event. There was another reason why so many young, trendy, tech-attuned people were at the show that night, snapping pictures of, or selfies with the artwork on their iPhones to post on their own social media accounts. 

It’s because we all look at these drawings and see ourselves portrayed in them. We identify with the subjects of Rappeneau’s work, and it says more about our culture than any of us have been able to articulate in quite the same way thus far. 

When I first discovered David Rappeneau a few years back it was through my ex-boyfriend, who I was still dating at the time. He showed me a drawing the artist had posted on his Instagram in November of 2021, depicting a young couple lounging on a couch in a plainly decorated living room. The male figure in this image has blonde hair and no shirt on, to show off his cartoonishly sculpted abs. A woman bends over him with a lit joint or cigarette in her hand, reaching towards an open beer car on the table, towards the viewer. Her hair is pulled back into two pigtailed braids, wearing leather pants and also no shirt on, to reveal her bare tits. My ex showed me this picture with a big smile on his face, exclaiming: “Look babe, it’s us!”

It warmed my heart at the time that he saw us as such a sexy couple, but I look back on this moment often as one where I should’ve considered if he actually really loved me. Because if he saw me as the sexy, naked, punk-rock lady in this drawing, he saw himself as the man with his face turned away from her. 

He appears distracted, disinterested, his mind clouded and his eyes set on some far away point outside the realm of the image. Maybe a television set? A window? Maybe we’re the window. He’s got his girlfriend’s leather-clad ass in his face and he looks away. As if this is a recurring scene for them, as if this level of sexiness is so expected that he’s grown used to it. He’s bored of it. She contorts her body over him so overtly, like she’s trying to cheekily maintain his attention. Though its clear to the viewer that she can’t. We’re here to validate the fear in the back of her mind, he’s over her. 

Though this piece wasn’t featured in Rappeneau’s most recent presentation, it represents a throughline that appears evident in the vast majority of his work. The simultaneous intimacy and distance, passion and abjection that exists in the blank faces and muted colors of his subjects, like each scene is being cast through the lens of a rainy day. The themes of sexual dependency but also bored depravity are present in the same atmosphere, possessing the same figures at once; perhaps this is what we identify with, where we see ourselves in these images. Because so many of us have mistaken these kinds of relationships for love before. And many more of us still believe that it is love, or that it could be.

Is it love? Or are we all just filling the space together? 

Most of the very few pieces in this show portrayed companions. Perhaps the most striking of all is that which is set in a bathroom. A figure is portrayed laying down in the bathtub with all of their clothes on, drifting off to sleep with a lit cigarette in their hand (they/them pronouns for gender ambiguity). Another figure sits with their legs crossed at the edge of the tub, holding a block of charcoal, rolling another cigarette between their fingers. 

This is love, but is it? 

Its intimate, there’s an open bottle of wine on the floor and a leaky soda can on its side on the shelf behind them. The scene is unkempt and these two figures are both products of, and fixtures in it. They are both together and independent of one another. Is it love to live in the messiest parts of each other's lives together? Is it love to roll your partner a charcoal filtered cigarette while they’re passed out drunk in the bathtub with all their clothes on? Probably not. But you wouldn’t be alone in thinking so. Because so many of us have tried to justify this as love for so long that we don’t even really know what love is anymore.  

There’s a reason why Rappeneau doesn’t draw his figures out to dinner over candlelight, or on a cute picnic at the park, why he rarely draws them even looking at each other. There’s a reason why he instead draws them covered in spit or cum, with their genitals hanging out of their clothes. He’s not saying that this is what love should look like, he’s merely showing us what its boiled down to and letting us make our own judgements about it. 

The job of an artist is to present us with familiar ideas and imagery in a unique light, requiring us to reconsider all we thought we knew about ourselves and the world we inhabit. To communicate concepts that are difficult to rest within us. Rappeneau achieves this through the liminal spaces he creates in his work, which all of his subjects appear to inhabit. Are these spaces only momentary, or are they implicit of the world existing outside of the image? The image existing somewhere between the beautiful and the grotesque, between love and abjection. The image which begs the viewer to consider: “Wow, this is really beautiful, but is it?” I want a love like this, but do I? Or, do I want a love like this because its the only one I’ve ever known? 

My favorite piece in the show was a small graphite drawing of two women laying in bed together, hung near the entrance to the show. They’re laying opposite directions from one another. One lays right side up to the viewer while the other lays upside down, curled up and scrunched into the right side of the paper. You hardly register there’s a second figure there at all until you look at the image more closely. Until you bend and contort yourself over the main figure until her companion catches your attention. A means of contortion often required by the viewer in order to absorb the piece in its entirety. To seek out the sometimes obvious, sometimes subversive, omnipresent grime that exists in tandem with the pleasantries of Rappeneau’s work. The subtle disinterest that underscores the modern love stories he presents us with. 

The face of the upright figure in this piece is not dissimilar to that of any of his other subjects in that it communicates the same sense of bored depravity that appears so consistent in Rappeneau’s images. Her eyes are sleepy and slender and half-open. Her lips are slightly parted, the look on her face bears no particular expression. It appears to me as if she has the same thought on her mind as I do each time I encounter one of these pieces:

“This is love, but is it?”