Photographic Colourism - Richard Caldicott's New Work

Christopher Schreier

Since its earliest days, photography has defined itself in terms of the dramatic relationship to its rival pictorial medium, painting. For a few years now, even decades, photography has been encroaching on painting in the largest exhibition halls of our museums. Instead of being content with a shadowy existence in the semi-obscurity of graphic cabinets, it appears in the form of large light-resistant prints or monumental lightboxes, as we see with Andreas Gursky and Jeff wall, that directly compete with painting, usurping it from the best positions in our galleries.

It is just such a success that could be wished for Richard Caldcott's photographic works, which clearly exceed the standard photo format of, say, a maximum 24 x 36 cm. Of a quite commanding, space-impinging presence, their dispute with painting, however, lies on a different, non-metric level. Even a first impression receals the painterly qualities of his art. what we take in is summed up in a phrase Eugene Delacroix once coined for painting, namely "sensations colourantes", the visual sensations that seem sufficient unto themselves and the eye of the beholder.

We may be tempted to regard these pictures purely for pleasure, and indeed the works' subltle play of colour and form suggests this response. Caldicott's latest works cultivate an aestheticism that make the viewer almost forget that these photographs possess an outside reference. Seen purely as motifs, they go back to an inventory of plaastic dishes or containers, mostly Tupperware, that in the early and mid-nineties Richard Caldicott piled up into imposing plastic structures. Although one might identify an individual salad bowl or lemon squeezer, the total form possesses a sef-referentiality that Caldicott has developed in later years. The ironic ontrast between an apparently modernist-constructivist sculpture and the reality of its trivial, everyday substance, is no longer really the issure. It may have been a sign of (English?) humour, but Caldicott's art has always meant to be earnest. His concern is the metamorphosis of the everyday, which for him has something almost alchemical about it. This unquestionably goes one step further that photography's chemical transformation of reality into two dimensional pictures at the touch of a button. The new works show that he is aiming for a kind of trasmutation of the functionality and entity of everyday objects in to two dimensional pictures at the touch of a button. The new works show that he is aiming for a kind of transmutation of the functionality and entity of everyday objects into the shimmering presence of simple translucent forms.

The means Richard Caldicott uses to to do this are much simpler than we may imagine. Working in his London studio, he operates with a rich collection of Tupperware products that he sets up very effectively using different coloured backgounds and a shrewd use of lighting. By photographing these objects from above they lose their identity, substance and three-dimensionality. In recent works however, he has realized a new level of abstraction by the superimposition of several transparencies. They recall x-rays that expose the latent radiating essence of the objects. These latest photographs, which oscillate between transparency and renewed density, complete the transubstantiation in which the objects limitations as well as the reproducing medium are surpassed.

In a sense Caldicott deserves to be seen among that group of great alchemists who tested their art in the genre of still life. We need only think of the master Dutch and Flemish still life painters of the 17th century or of the Frenchman Chardin to see in the works of this contemporary artist a similar ability to lend the most everyday and lowly objects and almost otherworldly aura. For the earlier artists this was a result of their painterly virtuosity and the magic of their brushstroke. In the same way, by the consistent application of the compositional possibilities of painting, Caldicott's work almost makes us forget the camera. By using his medium and at the same time transcending it, and pushing any question of the motif and the means of portrayal into the background, Caldicott creates a beautiful and even sublime art.

Translated from German by Jeanne Haunschild

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