Colin Richards

Current Review(s)

'Parrot Parrot'

Colin Richards at Gallery AOP

Colin Richards’ exhibition ‘Parrot Parrot’, which opened at Art on Paper on October 8, has been three years in the making; six, if one counts all the time since his last solo exhibition as time spent stewing over the next. That seems like an awfully long time. However, poring over the meticulous pen hatchings in his drawings and the tiny rectangles of paper so perfectly stuck in their places in his book constructions, it is a wonder that the exhibition eventually came to be at all.  Richards’ slowness and evident labour are staggering because almost no one in this age of pimp gallerists and fast-food multiples has the reserve to spend three years on a moderately-sized body of work. But in ‘Parrot Parrot’, patience is the law. It demands slow, studious viewing and an open ear, so to speak. 

There isn’t an overriding narrative or theme in this exhibition as much as there is a ‘language’ of motifs with which one needs to become acquainted. An excellent place to start is with Slow Literature, a watercolour painting of two tortoise shells flanking one another like the leaves of an open book. These carapaces, which in nature take ages to grow into the bony shields worn by old tortoises, are analogies for the concentrated endeavour of writing or making a work of art. But the open ‘pages’ of the figurative book are also an invitation for us to ‘read’ them, and the other works in the room, in a similarly measured way. Carapaces are also naturally deceptively ancient-looking things, and this pair intimates that the collection of works has an ancient history, one that reaches much further back than the years Richards took to compile the exhibition. That is not to say that this ‘history’ is autobiographical (there is almost nothing overtly autobiographical about the show) or even ‘real’, a possibility that comes under attack increasingly as one moves around the room. It is quite palpably there though, but as a sort of chronological ghost – a ‘past that has never been present’, to borrow Derrida’s phrase.

08 October 2009 - 31 October 2009

Listings(s)

'Parrot Parrot'

Colin Richards at Gallery AOP

Gallery AOP presents 'Parrot Parrot' by Colin Richards, an exhibition apparently a number of years in the making.

08 October 2009 - 31 October 2009