Output details

Ellipsis - Photographic works

Richon was invited to create a series of works to commemorate the centennial of the Museo Galdiano, Madrid. After systematically removing selected objects from the museum’s collection, Richon photographed the artefacts individually under specific lighting conditions, within the confines of the museum’s restoration room, paying close attention to their elliptical staging. The ellipsis produced gaps, introducing incompleteness and hesitation in meaning. Richon’s method of photographing the objects in daylight removed the effect of permanence produced by controlled museum lighting. In these pictures, this temporal dimension shifted, decontextualising the object from museum studies and connoisseurship. The outcome of the photographic act was a transformation of the object into an enigmatic sign that was cut off from its intended context, creating images suggestive of relics or fetishes.

The work was published as part of book ‘Mirada interior: centenario de "Parque Florido", Sede de la Fundación Lázaro Galdiano’ (Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2010), with essays in Spanish and English. Richon drew further on this research in his essay ‘Jean Baudrillard: Photography as disappearance’ in 50 Key Writers on Photography, edited by Mark Durden (Routledge, 2013). He also gave a keynote paper on ‘Fetish and relic’ at the ‘Shadow Image Conference’ at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (2011), published in Oriental Art: ArtToday, Beijing (2012).