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A Practical Guide to Intelligent Design
4-28 November 2009
The bedrock of Peter Rapp’s A Practical Guide to Intelligent Design is the primary truth or original allegory, the Book of Genesis. Delicate drawings are pressed against a backdrop of overlaid excerpts from the original text with Rapp’s figures appearing to embody the quintessential everyman. However, instead of the authorised moral journey from birth to death, something darker appears to be at play.
His characters are morphed, ruptured, deformed and disfigured. Rapp offers them extra orifices, supplementary points for sensory connection in the form of distended mouths, ears, eyes and fleshy sockets but they remain isolated and uncommunicative, mired in a fog created by the layered text.
Influenced by his own struggles with his Catholic upbringing, Rapp offers a personal perspective on the rift between the historic ideal and the lived reality of man’s isolation; an emotional and physical schism formed by the weight of guilt and conscience colliding with the disappointments of modern life.
by Katharine Fry
A Practical Guide to Intelligent Design Artist’s book, pigment prints on archival rag paper, Signed and hand-bound edition of fifty 2009, £35 BUY NOW
Babel Etching and aquatint print, edition of twenty 2009
Blessed Etching and aquatint print, edition of twenty 2009
Brothers Keeper Etching and aquatint print, edition of twenty 2009
Cursed 1 Etching and aquatint print, edition of twenty 2009
Cursed 2 Etching and aquatint print, edition of twenty 2009
Pharoah Etching and aquatint print, edition of twenty 2009
Abram Etching, aquatint and chine collé print, edition of twenty 2009
Photography Alessandra Chilá
FLASH Review Redchurch Idler
The bad acid imagery of Peter Rapp’s Intelligent Design would normally
belong in a zine, its mutant cartoon figures
parading across Old Testament wallpaper
in a post-apocalyptic narrative: the return
of the devils of Loudun, an outbreak of
St.Anthony’s fire, the studio disjecta of Hieronymous
Bosch, a believer’s detox session?
Its black cloth binding suggests a prayer book
or catechism, but the scary endpapers
and brand of genetically modified religion
soon upset the reader’s quest for solace,
Rapp’s fastidious production values
exemplified by inkjet printing on
Somerset archival rag, quite at
odds with the guide’s trashy content.
