USC FISHER MUSEUM OF ART

VICTOR RAPHAEL: TRAVELS AND WANDERINGS 1979 - 2009



By ARIADNI A. LIOKATIS, Curator

“The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.”

— Marc Chagall

VICTOR RAPHAEL MATURED AS AN ARTIST in the late 1970s, and he has managed to retain and communicate that sense of wonder Marc Chagall mentions so eloquently. The exhibition Victor Raphael: Travels and Wanderings, 1979 - 2009 brings together more than one hundred and fifty works from the past thirty years. It is not a retrospective but a survey that reveals the many sides of his artistic personality and his numerous means of artistic expression. Raphael’s travels and wanderings spanning the period 1979 to 2009 reveal a thirty-year multi-faceted exploratory journey that is at times real, literal, imagined and metaphorical. It ranges from an imaginative and poetic exploration of the cosmos and outer space, a physical exploration of new lands and cultural experiences, delving into his own ancestry and cultural background while reconciling with being born and raised in Los Angeles, exploring his artistic personality and self, and an inquiry into one’s own spirituality.

This exhibition Victor Raphael: Travels and Wanderings, 1979 - 2009 is the result of a collaboration that evolved organically between artist and curator. The following text takes the form of a dialogue between the artist and the curator, and alternates between curatorial commentaries and the artist’s voice. To borrow Albert Einstein’s words, “True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.” Victor Raphael chose Polaroid photography as his primary medium, but his work and his artistic language take many forms: from Polaroids, digital prints, unique digital works on canvas, paintings, of varying scale—from tiny to large—a CD-Rom, videos, to a site-specific installation. A prolific artist, he creates comprehensive series of works within a specific thematic series. He is interested in exploring the iterations that are a result of the creative process, as he points out.

He uses Polaroids as a study, or starting point for his other works, but the Polaroids become finished works in themselves. Raphael merges traditional and new media very creatively and successfully—from painting to traditional and digital photography, and video—to create a unique and innovative artistic language. Adding at first copper acrylic paint to the surface of his Polaroids, he subsequently switched to gold and metal leafing, attracted to the material’s lightness and reflective aura, and ephemeral nature. The application of gold and metal leaf on Polaroids is one of his original contributions to the field. He thus has multiple identities as an artist: photographer, painter, filmmaker, and curator.

Ariadni Liokatis: What drew you towards—or why did you choose—Polaroid photography in the first place? Can you talk about the interaction between photography and painting in your work? How did you get into filmmaking and curatorial work? Regarding metal and gold leafing, how did the process of using this material start? What is the significance of this material in your work?

Victor Raphael: The instant factor of the Polaroid was very important. I had been shooting 35mm film since high school. I could take a Polaroid camera with me when I traveled and see immediately what I had. I was also attracted to the singularity of the Polaroid print. It was something unique. One of a kind. It’s really an icon for my generation. One of the first shooting trips with my Polaroid camera was to Jackson Pollock’s home and studio in Springs, Long Island. This way of working allowed me to bring the Polaroids back to my studio and complete the work by adding acrylic and leaf material to the surface of the Polaroid. As I got more and more into art and the history of art, I became fascinated with the effect that photography, since its invention, has had on painting. Some of my Polaroids from the early 1980s had no photographic element at all. I simply used the Polaroid border as an arena to paint in. Then I started to paint on Polaroids that had photographic imagery, using the photographic element as a starting point and either obscuring or highlighting aspects of the image to transform the piece. The first exhibit where I showed only Polaroids was in 1987 at the Richard Green Gallery in Los Angeles. The title of the show was Small Paintings. I suppose it was my way of making a statement about the rigid categories of art media at that time. In the mid-seventies I began experimenting with portable video equipment and making short documentaries and narrative pieces. This eventually led to getting a job making films and videos for the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA. Since that time I have continued to make videos for personal interests, and for profit.

As for curating, I sort of fell into it. I was teaching an art class at the University of Judaism and was invited to join their Fine Arts Council that ran the Platt Gallery. I stayed on the Council for about twelve years, ten of which I was involved in curating over fifty exhibitions. It was a great experience. To be able to visit the studios and work with so many gifted artists was a real privilege.

I have had an interest in metals and minerals since I was a kid with a rock collection. I first started using a copper paint that was acrylic based with powdered copper pigment. This color for me represented the unknown. In the early UFO series this was a consistent element. I gravitated toward the leaf materials looking for a way to branch out from that point. I liked the way the light was reflected off the leafed surface, and the way the surface changed depending on the time of the day or the quality of the light. The oxidation factor introduced the element of time, which would play out over the life of the artwork.

Ariadni Liokatis: Various scholars and intellectuals have written and interpreted your art and its driving forces over the years, but I would like to ask for your take on how you view your work and your artistic identity?

Victor Raphael: I hope my work can speak to people on different levels. That’s why it’s so hard to put into just words. How I view my art is a tough question. I certainly have an approach and a process that I adhere to in my studio work. But the sense of discovery and mystery are what compels me to make artwork. My art comes out of my experiences. The unique skill set I have acquired along the way allows me to move from one medium to another as required. My general orientation is to believe what Einstein said, “There are two ways to live your life—one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Victor Raphael matured as an artist in the late 1970s—coinciding with the start of the period covered by the exhibition. The late 1960s and 1970s constitute important and formative years as they were marked by a remarkable intensity in the frequency of his travels, and his exposure to a number of different cultural experiences. Raphael first visited Europe—England, France, Holland, Switzerland, Spain and Italy—in 1969. His most notable museum experiences were the Tate Gallery and the British Museum in London, the Louvre Museum and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, and the Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Between 1970 and 1975, he traveled by train from Los Angeles to Boston and New York via Chicago. He visited the Art Institute of Chicago, and in New York, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He camped throughout California, Arizona, and Utah, and drove from Los Angeles to Boise, Idaho, then to Vancouver, B.C., and back to Los Angeles down the Pacific Coast. In 1977 he traveled to Europe (England, Scotland, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Spain) and North Africa, and visited the birthplace of all four of his grandparents (Rhodes and Thessalonica, Greece, and Istanbul, Turkey). He was impressed with the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. He was married and spent his honeymoon in 1978 traveling from New York to Miami, New Orleans, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Mexico City. He returned to Mexico City in 1979, and spent a month the following year in Spain (Madrid, Toledo, Granada, Córdoba, Seville, Cadiz, and the Canary Islands), researching Sephardic history. His first daughter was born in 1980.

AL: Looking back at the period of the late 1970s, which is when we are beginning the survey in the show: it is a period marked by your first mature works, following a period of frequent travels in the late 1960s and 1970s (your honeymoon in 1978 in Mexico, which started the UFOs series) and you are about to have your first child, which will change your life. How did family life affect the rest of your career, was it a turning point in your career?

VR: Having kids definitely changes your priorities and the way you spend your time. I think my big push with the Space Field series happened around the time my second daughter was born. I knew I’d be traveling abroad less while the kids were growing up so Space was a good place to go.

Raphael’s imagined wanderings through space and time are the source of the Space Field series, an ongoing body of work at the center of the artist’s work for the past twenty-five years. The series includes altered Polaroids, Chromogenic prints, unique digital works on canvas with metal leaf, a CD-Rom and a site-specific installation. As a child, he dreamt of becoming an astronaut, traveling in a space capsule taking snapshots of planets, stars, and various celestial phenomena. Using real NASA images from the cosmos as a source for these works, he photographs and manipulates them, adding gold and metal leafing, thus transforming them into beautiful pictures that have a universal, ethereal, spiritual, and timeless quality.

Raphael feels this is a golden period in terms of man’s ability to capture these images that are magical, and to which we have become so accustomed, that we are taking them for granted. The advances of science and technology provide new ways of seeing the universe; however, Raphael’s work is driven by his imagination, not science. The series addresses the fact that man is a small part in the immensity of the universe, and the interconnectedness of all things in the universe. A whole gamut of celestial bodies and phenomena are depicted in highly dynamic—at times dramatic—compositions, and color, light, and shade schemes. The most recent piece in the series, Vapor Trails, which will be shown here for the first time, especially embodies all these qualities, and stands as the culmination of the artist’s work. It merges the celestial and the earthly realms—outer space, water and earth. Raphael strives to find new ways of stretching the imagination, continually trying to break new ground, in order not to repeat himself. Indeed, this specific body of work has sustained Raphael’s interest for almost three decades—the series includes hundreds of works—with successive variations on a theme remaining equal in inventiveness and novelty. Ongoing technological advances in space exploration provide a constant and renewed source of imagery and inspiration for the artist.

AL: Can you tell us about the significance of the Space Field works, which has been an ongoing series spanning the past twenty-five years?

VR: The whole Space Field series has been informed by our discoveries and the new images from outer space. That’s been the driving force that has kept it going for so long. Along with my childhood fantasies of flying in a space capsule taking snapshots across the universe. When you think about things in terms of cosmic time and the enormity of the cosmos it puts things in a very humbling perspective.

AL: This is such a significant ongoing series in your work. How do you see the evolution of the series over the past twenty-five years?

VR: The subject of space for me is a lifelong interest. I had hoped to go out into space at one point, but as I get older, the chances of it happening will get slimmer and slimmer. The interesting thing about the development of the Space Field series is that what first began as an interaction with painting and photography has now been informed by the development of digital technology, which has transformed the series in new ways. Interactive technology that allows the audience to be a co-pilot with the artwork really opens up new territory for engaging an audience.

The Space Field series also includes a contemplative site-specific installation consisting of a suite of three Chromogenic prints titled Nachamu, Nachamu: The Heavens Spread Out Like A Prayer Shawl (2006) and a projection of the video Spacescapes (2008). The Nachamu…  suite of Chromogenic prints were commissioned by Nancy Berman and Alan Bloch and the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation for the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles.

AL: What was your experience working on and the personal significance of the commission and site specific, permanent installation of The Heavens Spread Out Like a Prayer Shawl at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles?

VR: The commission was a creative challenge and an opportunity to do something I had never done before. My creative challenge was to work with a group of rabbinical students to transform a classroom with art, informed by the Hebrew text, Pesikata deRav Kahana, Pesikhta 16. Dr. Barth and his class were very embracing of the project. The students made an illuminating presentation focusing on the relevant imagery and concepts for me to consider. We were all students and all teachers. I taught them about art, and they taught me about Hebrew text, all with the same goal of transforming their learning environment. It became another form of collaboration.

AL: One of your other ongoing series titled UFOs, and which originated from your 1978 honeymoon in Mexico and Teotihuacán, refers to probing into the unknown and unexplained phenomena, and space and time travel. Your interpretation and understanding of the term “UFO” is broader than the customary sense of unidentified flying objects, as it encompasses enigmatic or unexplained entities or phenomena. Could you elaborate on the significance of the series?

VR: Man certainly has shown an interest in the heavens and visitors from out there throughout history. But on another level to keep open the idea of mystery and unexplained phenomena. I like what Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” You have to leave room for the exceptional and the extraordinary.

AL: You have collaborated on works with other artists, Jean-Pierre Hébert, Jim Coke, Bill Aron, David Jordan Williams, and Clayton Spada. This brings another dimension to your work, and the nature of the collaboration varies from you working on an existing work, or vice-versa, your “collaborator” modifying your work. How did this whole concept or idea start and what are the creative rewards and challenges this type of project brings?

VR: Each collaboration is different and brings a different energy and chemistry together. It’s a nice contrast to working by yourself in the studio. Mutual respect is a big factor. I think it’s interesting to see what you might do together that you couldn’t do by yourself. The collaboration with Clayton Spada is virtual in the sense that we pass digital files back and forth as we refine our images. With Bill Aron and Jim Coke I was invited to select images of theirs that I felt I could enhance or transform in some way. With David Williams, the theme of UFOs was a subject that already had engaged us both, so we had many sessions side by side creating new images together. With Jean-Pierre Hébert, I illuminated his prints and drawings with leaf while he transformed my digital files with his personal algorithm software.

Concurrent with the USC Fisher Museum of Art’s show Victor Raphael: Travels and Wanderings, 1979-2009, Raphael and Spada’s latest collaborative and original work will be featured in an exhibition at the USC Doheny Memorial Library titled From Zero to Infinity: The Story of Everything, offering multilayered perspectives on the nature of the universe.

Victor Raphael has traveled frequently throughout his life and most recently to Japan and Alaska. A comprehensive series of work resulted from these trips that includes Polaroids, Chromogenic prints, digital works on canvas, paintings, and videos. In Japan, the artist visited major urban centers and more rural areas, and came into contact with both the traditional Japanese culture and the fast-paced neon-lit Westernized world of modern-day Japan. The coexistence of these two highly contrasting worlds struck the artist, and this is especially evident in the 2002 video, Travels In The Floating World, where he takes us on a tour that includes Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, and the Miho Museum in Shigaraki. The natural ambient sound of the video adds to the immediacy of the viewing experience. The Japan series, titled Pictures of the Floating World, refers to the term “Ukiyo-e,” the main artistic genre of Japanese woodblock prints (or woodcuts) and paintings produced between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, history, and urban pleasures, and referring to a fleeting world of impermanent, evanescent beauty. These prints became a source of inspiration for many European and Western impressionist painters, and eventually for Art Nouveau and Cubism. Raphael’s altered Polaroids with gold and metal leafing and large prints from this series show both facets of Japan, the old and the new: prayer stones, golden temples, and Buddha statues, are depicted in juxtaposition to subjects of the ultra-modern lifestyle of the city and its neon signs.

The 2009 Alaska series—Raphael’s most recent body of work—stands as a total contrast to the Japan series. Polaroids, Chromogenic prints, a painting, and a video titled A Visit to the Hubbard Glacier chronicle the artist’s most recent travel venture. The video possesses a highly poetic and meditative quality as one watches entire blocks of ice falling from the glacier into the water and drifting away. The primordial nature and the awe-inspiring scale of the Alaskan landscape fascinate the artist. Raphael has always been drawn to water, and the metal leaf on canvas Alaska Water Painting belongs to an ongoing series of large water paintings initiated with the Getty Water series. Attracted by water’s timeless, dynamic, ephemeral nature, and reflective qualities—an attraction mirrored by the artist’s enduring fascination with the reflective quality of the gold leaf surface and its reflective aura—Raphael created large paintings of fields of liquid gold or metal leaf with fleeting reflective ripples. Water—also present in the Japan series and the Paris Louvre series, notably with Raphael’s homage to Monet’s Water Lilies—turns into gold through Raphael’s artistic alchemy.

AL: What motivated you to choose these destinations?

VR: I’m always thinking about the next trip. Any opportunity to travel is an opportunity to do new work. In the case of Japan, I ostensibly went to attend the opening of American Perspectives: Selections from the Polaroid Collection at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum. But Japan was a place I had long wanted to visit, so I also saw Kyoto and Hiroshima on that trip. The Alaska trip was a cruise with a large family contingency. But when I go, I take several cameras including a Polaroid Spectra, a point and shoot digital and a Digital Video camera. This way I can bring back lots of source material to work with.

AL: Going to Japan amounted to going to a continent you have never visited. You had previously been to the Americas, Europe, and Africa, but never to Asia. How much of a cultural shock was it to visit Japan? Same question for Alaska: What impact did these two new experiences or encounters have on you personally and artistically?

VR: Not really a culture shock with Japan. It was different, but I did have a limited exposure to Japanese culture growing up in Southern California. In Japan it’s interesting to see how America has influenced the younger generation in contrast to the traditions of their elders. Alaska is more of a physical experience. The unique cultural element in Alaska is the Inuit culture adding a mythological framework to view the landscape. The primordial nature of the elements up there are so overwhelming in scale and majesty. One of the great things about having these diverse experiences is that it keeps me open to new things and hungry for more.

Henry Ellis once said, “Every artist writes his own autobiography.” Many of the bodies of work included in this exhibition incorporate autobiographical elements that are central to Raphael’s art. Raphael was born and raised in Los Angeles. A descendant of Sephardic Jews, the artist has European ancestors, and roots in Greece, Turkey, and Spain. In 1977, he traveled to Europe and visited the birthplace of all four of his grandparents. He spent one month in Spain in 1980, researching Sephardic history. He returned on a second trip to Greece and Turkey with his parents in 2007, introducing them to the birthplace of their ancestors. A series of works in the exhibition concentrates on Jewish subjects and tackles themes of migration, cultural displacement, the generational transmission of knowledge, and the links connecting generations through centuries—beyond bloodlines. The show notably includes 1994 Polaroid transfers depicting a synagogue in Córdoba, Spain, and a monosilkscreen From Breed Street to Wilshire Blvd (1998) printed at Self-Help Graphics and Art depicting the Breed Street Shul and Wilshire Boulevard Temple (which Raphael used to attend with his family). This work represents the migration of the Los Angeles Jewish community from Boyle Heights to the mid-Wilshire area. The Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles hosted the city’s most populous Jewish community from 1910 to 1950. The district around Breed Street Shul became a center for the Jewish community. One of the most compelling pieces of the series is a short video titled A Call to Prayer (2008) the artist shot with his point-and-shoot digital camera, and which depicts the interior of a synagogue in Istanbul. The occurrence of the Muslim call to prayer echoing in the background provides an interesting and thought-provoking commentary on the coexistence of diverse cultural and religious influences. This body of work has a personal resonance for Raphael as it embodies the exploration of the artist’s personal and cultural history and ancestry, reconciled with being born and living in Los Angeles, a highly decentralized, sprawling megalopolis, rich in ethnic diversity and complex, overlapping and fragmented multicultural narratives. Philosophical reflections—partly informed by the Kabbalah and the teachings of Jewish mysticism—underlie some of Raphael’s work: man’s place in relationship to the universe and its temporal and spatial infinity, and generational and ancestral connections through shared DNA and religious convictions. Several of the Space Field works reveal similar inquiries: celestial bodies of gold stemming from cosmic explosions or belonging to asteroid fields are floating in space—the crisscrossing pattern of the creases of the gold leaf resembling the network of lines that form fingerprints; others are reminiscent of strands of DNA. Lean and elongated—almost snake-like—these enigmatic entities are also found in the artist’s water paintings.

AL: You have traveled to the Mediterranean (Greece, Turkey, and Spain)—but interestingly, never to Israel—in search of or in order to connect with your ancestral roots. Can you talk about this quest and how do you reconcile your European/Sephardic Jewish heritage with being born, raised and living in L.A.?

VR: My Sephardic heritage has had a huge influence on me as a person. My grandparents told me stories of the old country with a great sense of nostalgia. When I visited those places I could see why. These are some of the most beautiful and history filled places in the world. When I first visited Rhodes, I had a letter written by my grandmother to a gentleman she knew as a child who showed me the house where she grew up. That sense of connection to time and history is what makes my background unique. In Los Angeles there is a large Sephardic family/community that all grew up here as the children and grandchildren of those immigrants who came from places like Istanbul, Thessalonica and the island of Rhodes. The American dream provided protections, freedoms and opportunities they never enjoyed before. But the rich life and history that was left behind gave them a lot to be nostalgic about.

Between 1985 and 1991 Raphael created a body of work on Jackson Pollock consisting of altered Polaroids, large Cibachromes, and a video. He was drawn to Pollock on both the artistic/art historical and personal levels: he was fascinated by his painting technique and use of pictorial space, and struck by his strong physical resemblance to the Abstract Expressionist painter. Raphael spent several months researching Pollock at the Archives of American Art, including the artist’s personal letters and records. He visited Pollock’s home, studio, and grave in Springs, Long Island. Raphael’s resulting 1986 video, One Gesture of the Heart; A Tribute to Jackson Pollock, is a powerful and moving homage to the iconic and turbulent figure, in which he plays or impersonates Pollock. Through his research and work on Pollock, Raphael attempts to put himself into Pollock’s shoes and skin, metaphorically wandering into the painter’s psyche in an attempt to separate the myth from reality and delve into his struggles as an artist. Through Raphael’s in-depth exploration of the artist’s psyche, the artist delves into his own artistic identity. He also attempts this exploration of self through various Polaroid self-portraits found in the Paris, Japan, and Getty series. Raphael’s range of self-inquiry is extensive and varied: from silhouetted portrayals on solid backgrounds (the Getty Villa’s South Terrace floor, the exterior wall of Pollock’s studio and at his grave, and at Paris Père Lachaise cemetery), a wavering shadow reflected in the Getty Villa’s Peristyle pool, mirrored images from reflections on store windows at Paris Rue de Rivoli and in the Ginza, Japan, to Pollock himself and as his ghost. Lastly, Pollock’s enduring influence on Raphael is manifest in works that reveal the mark of gestural abstraction, notably in the early Polaroid Ellipse-Eclipse (1985), and the later Polaroids Birthday Haiku I and II, Tokyo (2000) and the Illumination Night, Martha’s Vineyard series (2002-2003). In the latter works, Raphael photographed the moon in Tokyo and paper lanterns in Martha’s Vineyard at nighttime; he moved the camera in circular or diagonal rhythmical motions, amounting to photographic brush strokes. The resulting images reveal highly dynamic patterns of light, set against a dark background.

AL: Marcia Weisman opened her doors to you very generously to shoot the Pollock video. Can you tell us about this experience and Helen Harrison’s book on Jackson Pollock?

VR: I first met Marcia Weisman at an art opening she was hosting at the Cedars Sinai Medical Center for a show I was in. I had been studying Pollock so I knew she owned what some consider to be his last painting, Scent. So when we were introduced I asked her if she still owned the painting. She shot back quickly, “Why wouldn’t I still own it?” So I told her I would love to use it in a video I wanted to shoot, and she invited me up to see it. She was incredibly generous in opening up her home to our small crew. To thank her for letting us shoot there I sent her a box of chocolates and a Polaroid similar to the one that is in the show, titled The Ghost of Jackson Pollock Standing before his painting “Scent”. Helen Harrison, who is the Director of the Pollock Krasner Study Center, included it in her book on Pollock’s influence titled, “Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock.”

AL: There is a spiritual quality found in your work, especially in the Space Field works and in the water paintings, and some of the videos (notably A Call to Prayer and A Visit To The Hubbard Glacier). The gold leafing, with its art historical and religious associations, brings an added dimension to it as well. How do you view your work in terms of spirituality?

VR: Spirituality is such a loaded word in the art context. Almost 100 years ago Kandinsky was writing about the spiritual in art. Yet today in a theoretically charged art world, spirituality is somewhat suspect. My concerns in this realm are more about connection and dis-connection. If you live in the city, as most of us do, you loose touch with the night stars, the natural world, and with our frenetic pace, our sense of each other. So I guess you could say that my art is a quest for connections.

Raphael’s art is all about connections and the interconnected relationship of all things. The exhibition Victor Raphael: Travels and Wanderings, 1979-2009 attempts to show that the ideas and premises imbedded in Raphael’s various bodies of work are the threads of a single web, forming a coherent and profound artistic and personal vision.

If the Polaroid Big Shot camera was “pencil and paper” to Andy Warhol, Polaroid photography has played an integral part in Raphael’s art making process since the beginning. Using Polaroids as a starting point to bring his ideas to fruition, they also constitute one chapter in the suite of iterations he likes to explore as a result of the creative process. Drawn to Polaroid’s instantaneity and immediacy of result, Raphael also likes the experimentation part of it with the unexpected visual effects (“accidents”) that sometimes occur; instant photography also provides a unique interaction with the medium for the artist. While many artists, and most notably Chuck Close, are at loss and are mourning the end of an era with the 2008 demise of Polaroid and the announcement that the company will no longer manufacture instant cameras and the film, Raphael is willing to adapt to alternative means of expression available to him and explore the latest advances of digital photography—which he embraced for the past fifteen years. He assumes a very philosophical attitude about it, “nothing lasts forever, including us.” While for some artists the end of the Polaroid signifies the beginning of the end, for Raphael, it is the just the beginning.

Ariadni A. Liokatis, Curator