Rappaport draws from a history of modernist painting that includes the shaped canvases of Ellsworth Kelly or Frank Stella, the luminous apparitions of Paul Klee, or, at times, the colourism of Mark Rothko, the geometry of Piet Mondrian or the goofiness of Franz West. But despite its affinities with the past, Rappaport’s work is stridently contemporary and idiosyncratic. In recent work he continues to make work that pushes composition and formal balance to the edge of a precipice, finding surprising new spaces within traditional forms.