KES RICHARDSON
b. 1976, United KingdomKes Richardson (b.1976, Oxford, UK) lives and works in London. Richardson’s large-scale paintings appear to be impulsive and expressionist in execution but are in fact carefully planned. Working with small marker pen drawings, paint palettes, an iphone, laptop and projector, he scales-up, samples and manipulates his own imagery in a conversation between real and virtual worlds. For Richardson the digital tools become collaborators, providing removal from the creative act and suggesting surprising propositions. The resulting paintings render the inconsequential monumental and investigate ideas on authenticity, performance, time, space and humour.
Richardson started his series of “Nursery Droorings” in 2021 when he began collaging together sections of small drawings into larger compositions as a basis for his paintings. He felt that the interlocking marks and forms began to suggest natural phenomena, such as cloud structures or galactic nebulae, while still retaining an aesthetic that evoked children’s drawings. Stellar nurseries are the places where stars are born, nursery drawings are those made by pre-school children. For Richardson the tension between the cosmic Sublime and the formative daubings of a child is both absurd and poignant. He sees painting as a place where many things can co-exist, the laws of physics are suspended and distances, both spatial and cognitive, become malleable.
Text courtesy Alzueta Gallery.
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