Artist: Richard Caldicott

Table of Contents showcases a compelling survey of works by Richard Caldicott from the last 25 years, that delve into the interplay of perception, abstraction, and the material quality of images. Known for his meticulous attention to detail and inventive compositions, Caldicott invites viewers to re-examine the everyday through his lens, transforming the mundane into the extraordinary in an attempt to transcend the limitations of photo-based art.

Though he also produces drawings and prints, Richard Caldicott is best known for his photographs—abstract compositions of colours and geometric forms made from precise arrangements of Tupperware and other kitchen implements. While his use of such a mundane consumer product as Tupperware to create his exquisite photographic images could be considered ironic, Caldicott seems more focused on formal considerations than conceptual hijinks. His photographs have been compared to the Colour Field paintings of the Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.

Focusing on pure form and colour, Caldicott composes works in an almost notational, rhythmic way as can be seen in his mid-career series entitled Constructions, made by overlaying transparencies with different light. Larger abstractions, bold compositions of bars and rectangles look more like paintings than photographs, betrayed only by their flatness and the tendency, here and there, for the colour to blush and flare as light leaks out of Caldicott’s strict geometries.

His later paper negative photograms are abstractions, pared down to shape, line, and colour. This series of small-scale diptychs combine simple black-and-white photograms with the paper stencils in bright green, blue, red, and yellow that he used to create them. Although the work is light and unpretentious, echoes of Kasimir Malevich, Ellsworth Kelly, and Robert Mangold give it some weight. More recent “straight” photograms of found objects or “ready-mades” are purely “self-reflexive”. They are effectively “made of themselves”, as Caldicott describes. The deceptive simplicity of these works goes to the core of Caldicott’s artistic mission. They are the most pared back, almost bleak works, in this selection, but have a unique purity and intensity of purpose.

His latest series, entitled Performance Pieces, marks a departure from modernist serenity towards a focus on dynamism and force, compositions that mimic the forces of explosions and fractures. Using original works of his own he manipulates them on the bed of a scanner to create random deconstructed, one might even say desecrated, images in which the results can only be seen when the scanner has created the final image. These are then printed as unique C-type photographic prints. This takes his practice to the limits of what can and cannot be justifiably termed photography.

Looking back at the previous more than three decades of Caldicott’s career it is hard to think of a photographer who has been such a curiosity, almost impossible to classify and pigeon-hole within the formal constraints of purely photographic metrics. Experimenting with giant printing formats as early as the mid 1990’s Caldicott continued to push the boundaries of his craft and has created a staggering range of experimental works, which exemplify a profound and insatiable exploration of the intersection between photography and the conceptual understanding of space and form. It is an almost single-handed attempt to deconstruct photography and push it to his limits, which makes no attempt to preach or proselytise, but exists almost more as a work of introspection, attempting to define where art and photography become one.