Lari Rafailă: Stand Guard Over the Solitude of the Other

Lari Rafailă
Stand Guard Over the Solitude of the Other

16 October – 7 November 2026

Opening: Friday, 16 October, 6 – 9 PM

Stand Guard Over the Solitude of the Other, Lari Rafailă's first solo exhibition, takes its title from a phrase in the correspondence of Rainer Maria Rilke. In his writings from the early 1900s, among them those gathered in Letters to a Young Poet (translated by Mark Harman, Harvard University Press, 2011), Rilke sees solitude as the condition of any inner life. For him, the highest task of a bond between two people is that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. The exhibition places us, in turn, in the position of the one who keeps watch, and makes of this attention a form of closeness.

This reading rests on a distinction between solitude and loneliness. Loneliness is privative: it names an absence and is lived as abandonment. Solitude designates an inhabited interiority: a space of thought, memory and reverie that we occupy alone and, at the same time, alongside others. Closeness finds its ground there and takes shape around what remains irreducible in each person. To stand guard over someone's solitude is, in this sense, a form of care, perhaps the most discreet one.

Rafailă's painting gives this idea a visible form, through a practice that slips out of the logic of portraiture. The figures, stripped of biographical markers, act as carriers of feeling and are set in everyday contexts whose familiarity makes them immediately legible. This de-individualisation makes them available: in the absence of a fixed identity, the figure becomes a surface for projection, and identification moves from the viewer towards the image. The emphasis thus shifts from subject to relation.

The stake of this practice lies, however, beyond the figures, in atmosphere. There are images we feel we remember although we never lived them, and Rafailă's paintings belong to this category. They operate in a liminal register, between the oneiric and the real, with the logic of dreams: we are certain of what we see and, at the same time, overtaken by uncertainty. What appears owes less to objective reality than to reality as memory retains it. The scenes capture a present and carry, simultaneously, the air of things already remembered, as if experience began turning into memory before it had ended. What could become a story remains atmosphere.

This suspension of narrative has an important precedent in the history of modern painting. In Edward Hopper, the most ordinary situations (people in a room, in a bar, by a window) acquire a strange intensity precisely because the relations between the figures remain inaccessible to the viewer. Beyond any question of style, Rafailă's affinity with Hopper lies in this capacity to turn the banality of a situation into a space of psychological uncertainty. And where Hopper uses light to separate, isolate or charge a scene, Rafailă lets colour take over this role and reverses its direction: it binds the figures where Hopper's light keeps them apart.

Pictorial language is the surface through which this atmosphere becomes perceptible. Colour alters without distorting. Saturated, close to neon and yet settled, almost pastel, it frees itself from its descriptive function until it becomes hard to say whether it belongs to the outside world or to the inner state of the figures. The impression remains that the whole scene was built so that this colour could exist. Modelling in flat, barely modulated planes gives the bodies a sculptural presence, suspended between movement and rest. Scale, equal to or larger than the real body, and tight framing, indebted to the photographic snapshot and the cinematic close-up, place the viewer in proximity, while the compositions stay open and continue beyond the edge of the canvas, between the visible and the imaginable.

Something therefore always remains between the viewer and what is seen: a turned face, the edge of a frame, colour itself. Rafailă leaves this distance in place and paints it as a form of care. Brought together in the gallery, the works form a sequence of solitudes placed side by side and propose an ethics of looking grounded in trust and in the willingness to hold the other.