Samuel Richardot
La Galerie, Center for Contemporary Art Noisy-le-Sec
“One of the fascinating things about Samuel is his choice to cultivate a practice (painting) that the French art world has been battling with,” explain Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling, of BaliceHertling, the gallerists that gave Richardot his first solo show in Paris in the spring of 2008. Curator Benjamin Thorel had introduced them to Richardot’s work, just as the artist was finishing his studies at the Ecole National Superieure des Beaux Arts, Paris. Although currently based in Berlin, Richardot works outside of trends in contemporary German painting. “In Germany there is a pictorial tradition that cannot be denied, fed and maintained by the schools such as Leipzig and Dresden,” says Richardot, “and now there is too much of a certain type of painting.”
For his show at La Galerie, Richardot will present new paintings – some as large as 6.5 x 8 feet – abstract process works as well as works drawn from a more figurative experience of landscape. Concerning Richardot’s approach to his canvas, Thorel has written that “instead of covering it and taking it over,” for the artist, “the problem is to stretch its spaces, to stimulate its contradictions and instability, and to give rhythm to its surface.”
This exhibition also marks an important transition in Richardot’s practice as he moves into the third dimension – presenting a large sculptural installation composed of materials including cardboard, wood, and images from magazines. “Recuperating, recycling, and in a certain way pulling from the shadows” elements that Richardot finds “at the margins of the creation of [his] canvases.”
— Lillian Davies
