October 29 - December 10, 2010
by Robert J. Hughes
The act of looking at art involves not only concentration but release.
At a new show of paintings by Samuel Richardot at Balice Hertling in Paris, the squiggles, the abstract or the organic shapes on the canvases are like guideposts to perception as an act of meditative abandon.
In a large untitled painting that takes up almost an entire wall, the white canvas holds four sorts of reference points that are outlines of everyday objects – two circles in green that could be the ghost of a protractor, two red zygotes that could be the afterimage of calla lilies, a blackish sausage-like shape that suggests the twisted anthropomorphic shape of a balloon animal. But they're also mere shapes themselves. The point is that when you look at the painting, as you try to resolve the forms into something familiar, you begin to let go of the reality associated with that form and allow observing itself to take over; you are in the moment, rather than the interpretation of that moment.
Smaller paintings that ring the other walls of the space use those random elements of organic forms – triangles, circles, lines that could be everyday items or body parts – to draw you closer, then to push you back. The pleasure of Richardot's paintings isn't in their detail – though you do find yourself moving in to see how the paint saturates the canvas, or where a bit of something that seems extraneous, like a snippet of tape, adheres to the work – but in determining that details aren't essential to comprehension. And that comprehension isn't essential to understanding. That is, you don't ask, "what does it mean," but rather, "what am I not seeing," which is more about your own sense of reality rather than whatever real or unreal world a painting creates.
This is refreshing in an age of agitprop art, where once you get the point – usually a sarcasm or easy irony – the work itself holds little interest. Grand statements tend to dilute quickly in the swirling waters of contemporary communication. But with Richardot's paintings, you settle into a meditative calm. Several of the works have the contemplative allure of Agnes Martin paintings, with their repetition of soft pencil lines over a white background, like a visual koan that asks the viewer to understand through intuition. Others evoke, however glancingly, such different abstract artists as Kenneth Noland – whose paintings vibrated with brilliantly colored geometric forms – or even some of Piet Mondrian's quieter theosophical explorations of the meaning of life through his paintings' rectilinear distillation of the everyday.
Richardot's paintings give you the freedom to observe, to wonder, even. They hold back and beckon, they promise intimacy and calm, while so many other contemporary paintings are screaming "look at me."
