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Review Jan 16 2009 « | »
Olivier Richon Building a blog entry around Cartesian philosophy seems like a pretty bad idea, but Olivier Richon's Anima(l) nods vigorously......

Jon Openshaw

Building a blog entry around Cartesian philosophy seems like a pretty bad idea, but Olivier Richon's Anima(l) nods vigorously towards the 17th century natural-scientist and thinker in both title and approach, so here goes.

The private view was last night at Ibid Projects on Vyner Street, and the artist's second exhibition at the venue is a series of large still life photographs. I say 'still life', but the work is in fact organised around live animals (and this is, I think, where old René comes in). Descartes famously declared the animal to be a machine, driven by complex clockwork rather than the animating soul that distinguished humans. This meant they could feel no pain, was used to justify the fledgling practice of vivisection, and probably made no friends amongst the precursors of Peta and Greenpeace.

The animals in Richon's work are arranged in carefully composed dialogue with classical still life fare - a greyhound stands alert over grapes and velvet, a monkey investigates oranges and nuts, a tortoise nestles amongst books etc. This is all set within the confines of the photographer's studio, with muted and matt backgrounds of glowing grey. Both animate and inanimate subjects are rendered the same with a painterly aesthetic and a hyper-realistic attention to detail. What is created is a static stage set, and that is static in the sense that both animate and inanimate are equally charged.

Richon's photography is a meditation upon the tension between animate and inanimate, and the role of the subjective gaze in making these distinctions. A tortoise appears stiff plastic in one work and then becomes an almost unrecognisable blur of movement when seen through another exposure, whilst wine glasses huddle and lean into a stack of books as if magnetised.

Anima(l) is showing at Ibid Projects until 22 February, and more details can be found here.

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