PETER RAPP

About

The bedrock of Peter Rapp's A Practical Guide to Intelligent Design is the primary truth or original allegory, the Book of Genesis. Delicate drawings are pressed against a backdrop of overlaid excerpts from the original text with Rapp's figures appearing to embody the quintessential everyman. However, instead of the authorised moral journey from birth to death, something darker appears to be at play. His characters are morphed, ruptured, deformed and disfigured. Rapp offers them extra orifices, supplementary points for sensory connection in the form of distended mouths, ears, eyes and fleshy sockets but they remain isolated and uncommunicative, mired in a fog created by the layered text. Influenced by his own struggles with his Catholic upbringing, Rapp offers a personal perspective on the rift between the historic ideal and the lived reality of man's isolation; an emotional and physical schism formed by the weight of guilt and conscience colliding with the disappointments of modern life.