Richard Woods — Harvest — Semiose Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 24 → August 12, 2023

For his exhibition entitled Harvest at Semiose Gallery, the British artist Richard Woods presents a group of stools and coffee tables, whose forms and surface decoration imitate tree stumps. These pieces of furniture, whose vibrant colors permeate the exhibition space, are surrounded by a gigantic mural of stamped wood-grain motifs. Visitors to the exhibition are thus plunged into an immersive environment, saturated with patterns and vivid colors, inside a project that can only be described as an act of psychedelic carpentry.

Richard Woods is capable of transforming the surface of any architectural element or piece of furniture into a pictorial space: walls, floors, the facades of shops and houses or interior courtyards, tables, stools and even chests of drawers. These surfaces act as a support for the application of his preferred motifs, inspired by brick walls, the slats of parquet floors or flowery wallpaper for example. The everyday motifs that Richard Woods chooses to reproduce, although inspired by nature, such as the grain of wooden flooring, are always taken from the spheres of architecture and home improvement. Sometimes, a certain feeling of nostalgia pushes him towards the evocation of Tudor facades, wooden parquet floors and regency style wall coverings. These ornamental motifs, born from the idealization of natural objects, are reworked by the artist with tongue in cheek, and on this occasion, in bright and even garish colors and on a vastly exaggerated scale.

Whether in the form of furniture or installations, Woods’ work proffers a concentration of impressions and colors that immerse viewers in an alternative reality. Taking in an exhibition of Richard Woods’ work is like walking through a looking-glass, without the disturbing undertones of Carroll’s fiction. His oeuvre is an outrageous and joyful celebration of the patterns he reworks, shot through with a dose of nostalgia for the eras he evokes.