Samuel Richardot — Balice Hertling Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 29 → December 11, 2010

Balice Hertling is pleased to present new works by Samuel Richardot.

The exhibition consists of one large-format painting, a series of smaller paintings, and-new for the artist-a collage.

What is not at issue in these paintings is the search for a land between figuration and abstraction. Granted, the motifs in Richardot’s works are derived from various common objects: scissors, clouds, and so on. Sometimes one spots tromp-l’oeil traces, sly mocking ghosts of the object-that-was; at other times, the process of transformation tosses up new phantoms, a slideshow of flickering symbols, which, like the rabbit in the moon, or clowns in da Vinci’s wall of smoke, may or may not really be there at all.

The artist is interested in disguises of all kinds. More crucially, though, is the question of temporality. Or rather: disguise is a form of delay; it is a way of slowing down the viewer’s perception, thus offering a much slower, more saturated experience of time, nearer to eternity and intuitive mystical comprehension. Richardot uses a very diluted, rather liquid paint, which does not only sit on the canvas but also soaks into it; the painted surface becomes (or rather the artist reminds us that it has been from the start) a living thing, changing slowly-like all living things-before one’s eyes.

It is by way of this slow-time, which verifies and refutes the first world of fake symbols, and which is of course open to and determined by chance, that these paintings offer themselves not merely as images but more exactly as painting.