This is the story of two brothers who took very different paths, only to find themselves working side by side once again in a show in Amsterdam. In 2015 Renate, Léopold, Till and Alex were present when opening their show at Torch gallery in 2015 Comme une grappe estivale d’hélices de Pise.
This time around we are extremely happy and proud Léopold RABUS and Till RABUS will both be present for the opening.
To understand the massive paintings, lining the walls of TORCH gallery, you have to step back into a giant, wall-less childhood studio in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. For over a decade, this single floor wasn't just a place to work. It was a loud, breathing ecosystem of meetings, late-night parties, and nonstop creation. The brothers didn't just paint there, they lived there together with their parents. Léopold decided it was time to "reattach the umbilical cord," moving his workspace back to his parents' garden just a hundred meters down the path, where his mother still shares a studio on the same grounds. Till packed up and headed to a different space outside the family home but close enough.
Early in their global careers, they met their first major gallerist: Jérôme Jacobs, the director of Aeroplastics in Brussels. Jacobs, known for his atypical, nomadic approach and sharp sense of humor, became a close family friend. When he began showing the whole family together, the brothers jokingly worried it was a bit "too much" a total, unrelenting "Rabus Show." Yet, this family show at Aeroplastics championing their resolute, multidisciplinary approach only sharpened their individual styles.
Both Till and Léopold work from a shared, highly rigorous methodology. They construct a physical, three-dimensional reality out of everyday objects, freeze it with a photographic snapshot, and project that image onto large scale canvases. Tracing the contours with a pencil and mapping out the shadows, they place themselves in the direct lineage of painters like Hans Holbein, who first caught onto the magic of lenses and projected light.
Yet, as Till explains, "What makes realism so beautiful is that it is always an interpretation anyway." A camera lens might capture a static fact, but the human hand changes it entirely. The brothers share a radical stance on the art market's obsession with clean categories: the boundary between abstraction and figuration is completely paper-thin.
Léopold RABUS
His canvases are sometimes unapologetically massive. By scaling his subjects to a strict 1:1 ratio, Léopold forces a dramatic shift in perspective. A single fly, trapped inside a three-meter-wide landscape, is elevated from a rural nuisance to a profound existential anchor. It is a brilliant play with negative space, demanding that the viewer confront "the immensity of all the thoughts one can have about being."
Acting as a raw cabinet of curiosities, this new body of work is deeply tied to the village of Léopold's youth and his countless excursions to the Musée de l'Areuse in Boudry. Having been granted special access to photograph taxidermy birds "frozen in eternity," he captures the crazy, multiple positions that escape the human eye mid-flight. These birds, his ultimate leitmotif, become symbols of a perpetual painterly dissatisfaction. They are a testament to an artist who can no longer look at his own canvases after a month without spotting flaws, driving him to start over, again and again.
Till RABUS + Léopold RABUS
Having left school, with what they describe as massive educational gaps, the brothers used this endless painting time to rebuild their personal general knowledge from scratch. While their brushes move across the canvas, they listen. They consume entire audiobooks (from the works of Henry James to the complete Bible) and leave the radio running for hours.
The calm, focused energy of those solitary hours is what remains in their work. They have built visual stories that are entirely legible to anyone walking through the door, yet rich enough to invite multiple readings, hidden contradictions, and deeply personal interpretations.