The wondrous improbabilities of the invisible cities that Marco Polo conjured from his imagination not only beguiled the Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan; they inspired one of Italo Calvino's most celebrated books, entitled Invisible Cities. His poetic retelling of Polo's narratives
captivated Raquel Rabinovich who inscribed excerpts of Calvino's texts with rubber-stamped
ink upon paintings that share this name. These visionary transmissions involved oral, literary, and painterly forms of expression. They are separated by gaping distances of space and time. Yet they flowed gracefully from one to the other by sharing the art of evoking (not explaining), suggesting (not describing), implying (not asserting). Rabinovich's paintings epitomize such elusive qualities by rendering the city's topographic hardscape as a mirage formed of refracted light. Physicality and its mundane associations evaporate into mist. These artworks untether human consciousness and beckon viewers to undergo a journey that is as grand and inspiring
as Polo's, and as poetically relayed as Calvino's. They transcend season and era and place and self and memory and location and gravity. A Calvino quote chosen by Rabinovich relays these virtues: "From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its
repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other."
—Linda Weintraub
