Rainer Vilumaa
Leonhard Lapin is a strange artist. Actually he has graduated as an architect and is a self-made poet with the pseudonym Albert Trapeezh. As an architect, Lapin has pursued modernist purity of form and sublimity, as a poet he has produced vulgar doggerel. Although the conflict between these two diametrically opposed sides seems insurmountable, they have found a point of contact in Lapin‰s art, where one does not exclude the other and, properly dosed, may even complement each other.
The relations between sublimity and lust have not always been clearly distinguishable in Lapin‰s work. From time to time, one of the two has surfaced more. At the beginning, during his ‰woman-machine‰ period in the 1970s, Lapin playfully and with creative thrill coupled a modern language of form and machine aesthetics with erotic female archetypes (the machine represented the male archetype), where their proportions were more or less fifty-fifty. Later, in the 1980s, an essential shift towards pure abstraction and geometrical forms occurred. Although an inkling of the frivolous could be perceived, this element was ëennobled‰ through form and became less important.
The 1990s have brought with them another turn in Lapin‰s work. It is actually a return to the original relations - it is symptomatic that Lapin‰s exhibition in the Museum of Art was titled Erootika. Lapin cannot escape the erotic, rather it has been amplified there.