I Was a Teenage Hand Model
Hoxton Distillery, London
3rd October – 26th October 2003
www.hoxtondistillery.org.uk
Text.
Generating work that recalls product photography Richard Paul presents us with a gloriously fake universe of hyper-real objects. The images in this show stand out of time and out of reality – existing in a slipshod yet perfectly formed state of emptied meaning and malformed non-intent. Instead of capturing a photographic moment in time Paul creates abstracted objects that become a-signifying still-lifes, dislocating themselves from any conceivable notion of cause and effect. The objects in Paul’s work display a physicality that borders on the hyper-visceral, appearing as by-products of a process that liquefies real and solid things into abstracted subliminal seductions.
Consolidating colour and form with a sleazy approach of perfect sheens and willed perfection Paul enters a realm of surreal marketing logic. Significant fluids and cheese. Your heart’s / genital’s / local branch manager’s desire. Think what you will if you can. These works only aim to provide a stimuli, it is up to the viewer to produce the response to the paradoxical displays on offer. Stuff and nonsense becomes non-sensical stuff that is exquisitely packaged and marketed, entering into an exchange of signal and response that disrupts its own logic of desirability.
Ask yourself – "Am I being [sexually / intellectually / symbolically] aroused and / or challenged by this picture?" All these things are possible and more in this world of free-floating cocktails and dental wash.