As Christopher Schreier writes: "Of a quite commanding, space-impinging presence, their dispute with painting, however, lies on a different, non-metric level. Even a first impression reveals 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' subtle play of colour and form suggests this response. Caldicott's works cultivate an aestheticism that makes the viewer almost forget that these photographs possess an outside reference.
Seen purely as motifs, they go back to an inventory of plastic 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 contrast between an apparently modernist-constructivist sculpture and the reality of its trivial, everyday substance, is no longer really the issue. It may have been a sign of (English?) humour, but Caldicott's art has always meant to be earnest.
In His newest series of work Caldicott completely leaves the realm of the photographic object and deals directly with abstraction in itself. Daniel Buren maintained that "colour is the most interesting thing in art because it is the only thing you cannot speak about".
It is with this in mind that one should look at Caldicott's work. Working from collages and assemblages and then photographed stringently, by different techniques and presented as a photographic object in itself, his work has evolved, where. the object as subject has disappeared altogether, leaving only what were formerly colour backgrounds arranged in abstract, geometric compositions that constitute autonomous objects in their own right. In his images the collage, however, is never 'stuck down' it is only the process of photographing it that fixes the final result into an object.
Richard Caldicott (b 1963 in Leicester) studied at the Royal College of Art in London where he also lives and works. He has had many solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the US and is represented in the following collections: Art Lab, Tokyo, Karl Blossfeldt/Albert Renger Patzsch Archiv, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Merril Lynch, Sir Elton John Collection, BP Amoco etc.
Couplet, 2005 - 127 x 101,6 cm, C-Print and Diasec, Edition 5
