David Rabinowitch: Birth of Romanticism Drawings

FROM THE BOOK

"In the new drawings with the overarching title Birth of Romanticism, Rabinowitch created a tension between quick motion (of the creation as well as of the seeing apprehension) and the timeless determinacy (of elementary concepts of form) like never before. These drawings seem to have been produced with breathless haste- and yet still generate a coherent architecture from countless precise visual attitudes and references- a bottomless architecture, built solely from the momentary connections, amalgamations and differentiations of its autonomous elements. The fixed nature of the planar forms and their linear outlining movements and material layerings give rise to an unsettling, almost painful opposition. This only dissipates amidst the confluent intensity of the whole in which the perceptions of the elements are superimposed in simultaneous competition. Each of these drawings presents itself as a permanent momentariness, as a pulsating spluttering of all formations, each with its own distinctiveness and impulsivity, temporally apprehended by the viewer - with a gaze that does not wander or classify, but which is challenged with relentlessly mounting intensity. They are not drawings to be merely regarded, but to also be experienced and with which the individual himself is compelled to act - in a personal inner drama of seeing."

Erich Franz, excerpted from David Rabinowitch: Birth of Romanticism drawings.