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Dylan Rapillard is a Bahamian-Swiss contemporary artist born in Grand Bahama in 1979 and based in The Bahamas. His multidisciplinary practice spans painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, textile design and kinetic systems. Working with both traditional studio materials and objects gathered from everyday life, Rapillard examines island identity, tourism, consumer desire, labour, technology and the manufactured image of paradise.

His work begins with a close attention to materials. Paint, printed pattern, digital imagery, resin, found beach objects, shells, discarded plastics, mechanical components and domestic objects are layered, repeated and transformed. These materials often carry traces of previous use, commerce or environmental damage. Rapillard uses those histories rather than disguising them, allowing the objects to operate as evidence of how island environments are inhabited, marketed and consumed.

Recurring imagery includes shells, coral forms, pink sand, tropical flora, seasonal fruit, gardenscapes, souvenirs and sunrise colour. These subjects may initially resemble the visual language of tourism and decorative island culture, but they rarely remain stable. Through repetition, distortion, packaging and shifts in scale, Rapillard turns familiar signs of paradise into objects of uncertainty. Beauty and seduction remain present, but they are accompanied by humour, artificiality, exhaustion and excess.

Rapillard’s background in printmaking and textile design has had a lasting influence on his approach. Beginning in 2006, he spent a decade as Master Printer and Textile Designer at Bahama Hand Prints. During this period, he developed extensive experience in hand printing, colour separation, pattern construction and production. The discipline of textile printing continues to appear throughout his work in repeated motifs, layered surfaces and the movement between individual images and larger systems.

His early exhibitions include the solo presentation Sugar at Popopstudios ICVA in 2008. He later collaborated with artist Dede Brown on Peep Show in 2011 and Tickle Me Pink at the Central Bank of The Bahamas in 2013. Rapillard was selected for the National Exhibition of The Bahamas, including NE6 and NE7, and his work has been presented through institutions and spaces including the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Popopstudios, CAB Gallery, The Current and the Central Bank of The Bahamas.

In 2015, Rapillard was commissioned by Baha Mar to produce large-scale public sculptures and wall hangings. He has also contributed to public and collaborative projects at Lynden Pindling International Airport and other sites in The Bahamas. These projects expanded his practice beyond the conventional gallery object, encouraging a greater interest in scale, architecture, movement and the ways artworks operate within shared environments.

More recent work has brought together the different strands of his practice. Glitch Kitsch and Things Mother Would Like explored decoration, taste, nostalgia and the friction between domestic familiarity and technological distortion. Paintings, patterns and objects moved between sincerity and irony, questioning how images and possessions acquire emotional or cultural value.

His 2026 exhibition All Inclusive examined tourism as both an economic system and a fantasy-producing machine. Large sunrise paintings appeared alongside resin shell sweets, packaged fragments, graffiti-inflected portraits and sculptural installations. The exhibition drew on the seductive language of resorts, souvenirs and tropical abundance while also addressing labour, commodification and the pressure placed on island landscapes and identities. Rather than rejecting beauty, Rapillard used beauty as an entry point, allowing attractive surfaces to gradually reveal stranger and more complicated conditions.

Alongside his paintings and installations, Rapillard has developed interactive and kinetic sculptures using found objects, motors, improvised mechanics and repurposed machines. These works introduce time, movement and unpredictability into his practice. Objects may wobble, circle, attract, repel or repeatedly perform small gestures. Their movements can appear purposeful while accomplishing very little, reflecting Rapillard’s interest in behavioural loops, technological dependency and the absurdity embedded in ordinary systems.

Across these different media, Rapillard’s practice is united by a concern with transformation. Natural forms become products. Souvenirs become evidence. Machines develop personalities. Decorative patterns become systems of control or repetition. Paradise appears as both a lived environment and a commercial image continually reconstructed for consumption.

Rapillard approaches the island not as an isolated subject, but as a concentrated site through which broader questions can be examined: how culture is represented, how desire is manufactured, how technology changes perception and how people participate in the systems they critique. His work occupies the space between attraction and discomfort, inviting the viewer to enjoy the surface while remaining alert to the machinery underneath.