Nestled in an elegant turn-of-the-century mansion near the heart of Barcelona, Fundación Mapfre’s Casa Garriga Nogués Exhibition Hall is currently housing a sprawling 10-year retrospective of Richard Learoyd’s work, curated by SFMOMA’s Sandra Phillips and open to the public until early September. Containing 51 pieces spanning a decade of the artist’s life, the exhibition — travelling next to Fotomuseum Den Haag — covers a staggering amount of ground in what is not only a sublime revisitation of Learoyd’s oeuvre, but a timely refuge from the constant flow of digital imagery in the outside world.
Using a camera-obscura-based dye destruction positive-to-positive photographic process, Learoyd creates dreamy, larger-than-life impressions of meticulously arranged subjects, straight from reality to print — a method which imbues the photographs with a remarkable physicality and an almost mystical presence. Surrounded by the monastic silence of the gallery, disturbed only by the occasional muted creak of wooden floorboards and the distant hum of electric ventilation, these works exert a magnetic pull on the viewer, arresting the gaze and demanding an absolute surrender of the senses.
Where Learoyd’s still lifes are deliberate and artful, his portraits appear treacherously raw and unadulterated, standing in paradoxical contrast to the scrupulous, painstaking process behind them and the long history from which they draw: Learoyd’s works are as draped in a near-mythological reverence for the past as they are original and idiosyncratic. Recurring female models are depicted reflectively, seated melancholically in soft, Old Master light. Two stunning homages to Ingres and Lucian Freud, After Ingres and Julie Horizontal,stand out in particular as truly masterful discourses on form and volume.
There is something extraordinary about experiencing Richard Learoyd’s photographs in person, as much a product of the positives’ distinctive gravity as of the surreal, beautiful observation of the human condition they present, and The Silence of the Camera Obscura manifests their monumental sweep with rare brilliance.
Diego von Lieres und Wilkau
On view at Fundación MAPFRE until 7 September. Find out more here.
The Fotomuseum Den Haag show runs from 5 October – 5 January. Find out more here.
Lead image: Melanie, 2015. Fotografia única en paper Ilfochrome, 147.3cm × 121.9 cm. © Richard Learoyd. Courtesy of the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
