by Anika Bukon
David Rappeneau has managed to earn a following in the highest echelons of the art world despite no-one knowing what he looks like and making work that involves both materials and ideas that ordinary people can understand. One wonders who he’s sleeping with. His drawings look a bit like El Greco and Aeon Flux animator Peter Chung collaborating on ads for something hip, expensive, and aimed at post-gender youth.
The figures are firmly rooted in the the School of Schiele, bending sinewily through and around their fashionable suroundings in desperate and highly successful attempts to look cool smoking and examining their cell phones in dark, muted, layered pastels spiked with bursts of lipstick magenta, in front of acid-trip views of churches, cathedrals, modern cars, ancient Parisian streets—anything with enough twist and wriggle to mirror his cigarette-smoke line. In Rappeneau’s vertiginous compositions, figures penetrate the landscape and it penetrates them, sexuality is not so much on display as an animating feature of the space.
They are—as contemporary art goes—shockingly accessible. Sexy people, sexily drawn, thin and angsty but aiming at no target in particular, decadent and blank. What did he do to get past the art-world’s various self-contradictory filters?
In person, the drawings are surprisingly small, their white highlights surprisingly reminiscent of sidewalk chalk, their frames surprisingly domesticating. These images are Tumblr-friendly, Instagram-ready, just a little taller than they are wide just a little more detailed, obsessed-over, fetishized than the cartoon cels and comic panels which inspired them. They are not quite revolutionary, but they are loved and they entirely believe in themselves as beautiful objects, which is enough to put them in a rare class in 2026.
Image: Courtesy CASTLE