Real Allegories

Olivier Richon's work addresses various themes such as the desire for the exotic, the pleasures of imitation, the function of the object in the still life, quotation and appropriation of art history. These are slow images, where time stands still. Anti-naturalistic, they address the dream-like nature of representation as a frozen tableau, which may be deciphered slowly in the manner of a hieroglyph, yet which resists interpretation.

This book comprises a twenty year retrospective of Richon's work. The title Real Allegories is taken from the notorious painting by Gustave Courbet, which shows a painter in the act of depiction, surrounded by his cultural contemporaries. In the context of Richon's work, Real Allegories refers to the realism or illusionism of the photograph and to the allegorical, constructed dimension of meaning and representation.