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Русский(2014, Translation by Jane Roberts)
Naftali Rakuzin has chosen the book as his recurrent artistic theme. Beyond our initial, captivating, visual surprise, the artist plunges us into the realm of pure paint. On the shelves, books stand shoulder to shoulder in an order to which the different thicknesses of the spines instill a movement compounded by the vertical lettering, whose common denominator is the History of Art. A painter of a quiet life, of immobile reality, of tranquil Still-Leben, Rakuzin builds up book architectures, without depth, all fully frontal, frightening in their methodical accumulation.
(2011)
They are more than "oversize" in the librarian's sense. Across the gallery space in Moscow, Paris, Tel Aviv, or London, these swelling folio volumes appear a little nearer to you than they really are. Or, more to the point, you to them.1 Though nothing like photorealist close-ups, they make an exorbitant claim on the eye, oddly intimate. Rather than receding—as they would in an illusionist bookshelf—they loom large. And by their titles alone, even without releasing a given artist's reproduced image, they speak volumes. Naftali Rakuzin remembers the first book cover he designed as a child, for Gulliver's Travels.
(Catalog MEMORABLE VIEWS / CARTES POSTALES, 2009)
Alexander Rodchenko is not one of my favourite artists. He was a wonderful photographer, and many of his photographs delight me, but on the whole, his art does not touch me, just as the revolutionary art of that epoch generally. But the cover of his catalogue, which was made, by the way, in Moscow, touched me deeply. There is in it the tragedy of that time: in the composition, in the colouring — black-red-grey, in the framing, when Rodchenko's face is not visible, but a close-up is given of a hand with a camera. This was very interesting for me to paint: Rodchenko as an actor and victim of the Revolution.
(2009)
They are more than “oversized” in the librarian’s sense. Across a gallery space, these swelling folio volumes appear a little nearer to you than they really are. Or, more to the point, you to them. Though nothing like photorealist closeups, they make an exorbitant claim on the eye, oddly intimate. Rather than receding — as they would in an illusionist bookshelf — they loom large. And by their titles alone, even without releasing a given artist’s reproduced image, they speak volumes.
(Catalog of the exhibition in Bineth Gallery, 2008)
Books became my main subject matter mainly for biographical reasons. My father was an illustrator and a graphic artist. As a child, I watched him designing the covers and characters of books. It was quite natural for me to attend the “Polygraphique Institute” even though at the same time, between the ages of 14 to 19, I studied with a typical post-impressionist artist, Moses Chazanov. Having finished my studies at the Institute, I worked in Moscow as a graphic designer...
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