Raphael Egil: Readers

About

Readers is an exhibition of new portraits by Raphael Egil in which the sitters are reading, and being read, and reading us. The artist has sought new ground within the very old genre of portraiture, both formally and by expanding the spiral of looking that is typically found in this type: the sitters here have the agency not only to look back while being looked at, but also to look, or even be, elsewhere, or not to look at all.

Most of the works have been painted from life in the traditional manner, the sitters drawn from Egil’s immediate circle of fellow artists, friends and family. Others are known to him only through books, through reading: Doris Lessing, Marcel Proust, Rembrandt van Rijn, each a painter of portraits in their own right. These are as much portraits of the sitters’ works as their appearances.

Many of those who sat for the artist passed the time by reading, their bodies in front of him while their minds were elsewhere. This state of such interiority that a person can be said to be outside themselves is pursued by the artist in formal terms: he has distilled their physiognomies to a few short, text-like marks that in isolation look like signs or landscapes, and placed them over a keyhole-shaped ground that is both an abstraction of the portrait type in its most economised form, and a space that lets you in and pushes you out at once, interiority and exteriority made simultaneously present in the paintings.

The great influence that each of these subjects has had on the artist’s life, and his formation as a painter, means that in the end this group of portraits can be understood not only as an assembly of those who are reading and those who are read, but also as a single exercise in portraiture through which the artist has sought to read himself. 

Raphael Egil: Readers will open at CASSIUS&Co., 63 Kinnerton Street, London, on 1st December 2022 and run until 26th February 2023. This will be the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery, which was inaugurated in 2021 with the exhibition Raphael Egil: Paintings. The paintings will be presented alongside a concurrent ‘bookshelf exhibition’ of rare poetry books from the 19th century to the present, Walt Whitman to Derek Walcott.

Raphael Egil was born in 1975 in St. Gallen and now lives and works outside of Lucerne, where he graduated from the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in 2000. His work has been presented in group exhibitions across Europe as well as a series of solo exhibitions at Galerie Michael Werner. The exhibition Raphael Egil: Paintings inaugurated CASSIUS&Co.'s London gallery in 2021.