This solo show of British painter Ray Richardson is entitled WALK TALL in reference to the heady tune by Cannonball Adderley, as an injunction to keep his head high up that unites the works featured.
Since the 1990s, Ray Richardson stages in an unique atmosphere his personal experience, his neighbourhood of Woolwich in South-East London, nerve center of his world that also includes places like the English coast, Normandy, Paris, Ostend, Brussels, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, Tokyo: "[My work]'s quite often about life, class as well as seeing it in a filmic way through a film still in my case. I think we're riddled with class in England. They want to keep you in your place while mugging you off hat you've got a chance, which a lot of people will never have."
Bordering the River Thames, this working-class suburb undergoing gentrification offers an authentic setting with its docks, the Woolwich ferry and the pedestrian tunnel that connects the two banks of the river, its car parks and its pubs. The history of the place is intertwined with that of its characters. It is a world of men with sideburns and brilliantined hairs, more or less cool, who like to swagger. In a pack, alone or with the iconic English Bull Terrier, "the King of Dogs", "the supreme K-9 kommanders", as written by James Ellroy in a text dedicated to the artist.
Ordinary life is a spectacle that Ray Richardson seems to extract from a film, transposing "a cinematic way of seeing things" in a great chromatic richness. Bold framing, long stretched formats, off-center characters, close-ups, high-angle or low-angle views energize the spatial organization of his compositions. His painting also draws on the tradition of art history, the immediacy of street photography, the darkness of detective novels, the Mod revival and Casual imagery, on a Jazz, Soul, Funk, Rock soundtrack.
He has a striking way with image and word. His titles mix popular expression, cockney slang and musical borrowing to better trigger a spark, an emotion, a questioning, a narrative tension... Ray Richardson's work is literally full of imagery, halfway between a description of a sociological microcosm, a sophisticated play on the codes of painting and a metaphorical reflection on the human condition. Its shows as much as it underlies, sometimes in a very unexpected way, a funny or scathing commentary. WALK TALL deals with living together (Today's Special), the hope for better days (Herbie Hancock, Silver Linings, Double Treble Top), the need to be satisfied with one's condition (Sailors Fighting in the Dancehall, Vivre pour vivre), the work of painting (Performancedup, Same Meat Different Gravy, All Around the World). As more disillusioned reflections on the British class system: Just Got Lucky evokes the lottery of birth, Out to Lunch the gap between the bourgeois world and the working class, The Man Who Wouldn't Be King the increasing difficulty for ordinary people to get ahead by other ways than boxing, football, showbiz or worse.
WALK TALL as "the King of Dogs", the alter ego of the painter and the voice of reason in a world that is missing it. A working class hero is something to be.
