Rob Raphael: Immobile

About

Raphael primarily focuses on the material phenomena of ceramics. His practice explores what is imbued in objects as they transit through time. His work engages with the history of decorative art and the seductive power of ornament. In recent years he has conflated references from the disparate histories of classicism, pattern and decoration, the Weiner Werkstätte, and modern architecture to create his own language of objects.

With “Immobile,” Raphael presents a new body of work inspired by Italian Rationalist Architecture. While working and traveling in Italy, Raphael became fascinated by the buildings erected across the country under Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Invoking the monumental scale and symmetry of ancient Rome, these modernist structures were both tools of propaganda and the physical embodiment of a new Italian nationalism. Raphael perceives this body of work as a meditation on or exorcism of the complex nature and troubling allure of these structures. Focused on the buildings as sculptural objects—built as propaganda, and living contemporary lives in the present, the architecture is haunted in some way by the weight of this history.

For this exhibition Raphael focuses in particular on two iconic buildings: the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome and the Casa del Fascio in Como. The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, still engraved with a phrase from Mussolini’s 1935 speech announcing the invasion of Ethiopia, now stands as the headquarters of Fendi. The Casa Del Fascio (also now known as Palazzo Terragni), conceived as the local office for the National Fascist Party, later housed the National Liberation Committee, an anti-fascist organization, and today is the local headquarters of the finance police. Raphael questions, “Is it this ambiguous place they hold between classicism and modernism, structure and ornament, political and apolitical that make them so seductive now?”

Through his work, Raphael processes his attraction to the objects created during Fascism, while living in a world still being seduced by the propaganda of autocracy. Alongside his ceramic-based sculptures are new wall works created during a hand-papermaking residency at Dieu Donné. The final element of the exhibition are a series of ceramic phalluses, drawing on an element of ancient Greek hermae—statues featuring the head of Hermes atop a limbless rectangular column decorated with an anatomically correct phallus. Raphael, fascinated by the magic imbued in these objects, which were believed to have apotropaic powers of protection, makes them for his own protection, the protection of others, and in memoriam for people who could have used protection.