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13/9/2005

Alessandro Raho

Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Solo show
First Floor space: Guy Bourdin selected by Alessandro Raho

“Not even those who detest art will be averse to the presence of picture galleries near luxurious shops. For a moment luxury may satisfy greed and provide the riches that separate us from loneliness. We sniff a bountiful air at shop windows, contemplating possessions not yet allotted.”
Adrian Stokes, ‘The Luxury and Necessity of Painting’, The Image in Form (1972)

Alison Jacques Gallery is pleased to announce a solo show of works by Alessandro Raho. Accompanying the artist’s work will be an exhibition of photographs by Guy Bourdin, selected by Alessandro Raho.

Alessandro Raho paints portraits of his friends or members of his family, of landscape scenes and ‘still life’ arrangements set up in the studio. Using oil paint, he makes the photographically derived images more concentrated and unreal. As though in excessive denial of the way that an artist such as John Currin’s smeared surfaces express a fascinated disgust for the ‘dead’ medium, Raho exploits painting’s manipulable and rich surface, imagining it as confectionary, or butter-cream icing. He references depictions of displayed cakes by Wayne Thiebaud or the fresh, flat colours of Fairfield Porter or Alex Katz. The luxury of the image surface is intensified by the deliberate emotional pull of the subject looking back at you or the prettiness of cut flowers or a sunset on a beach scene. The images are selected by the artist both for their real meaning and because they represent what might be universally recognised as prompts to nostalgia and memory.

Raho imagines the effect of his paintings, installed at the gallery, as a kind of ‘boutique’. In his collection of essays Inside the White Cube, Brian O’Doherty wrote that “to insert art into a gallery or display case puts the art in ‘quotation marks’. By making art an artificiality within the artificial, it suggests that gallery art is a trinket, a product of the boutique.” As oil paintings on canvas, the works exaggerate and compress these notions of artificiality and contamination by commerce into single images. His signature paintings of figures posed in front of a white ground such as Simon – standing against a theatrically neutral backdrop akin to the abstraction of the white cube – are marked out as compositional displacements from photographic capture of the real. A second painting, Catherine, brings the standing figure into the outdoor landscape for the first time, but combines a vivid evocation of presence with a sense of fakery through its idealised treatment. The paintings extract the elements of pure visual desirability and transfer them to canvas via the language of genre painting. Raho seeks to locate an essence of the visual pleasure which drives our culture and to investigate how it might be plotted in relation to real experience and emotion. He ‘inhabits’ the image form as though the paintings are all substituted self-portraits. This body of work represents an on-going attempt to make the most satisfying image in a static, hand-made picture.

The Guy Bourdin works selected by Alessandro Raho for this small but intimate show on the first floor of the gallery date from 1972 – 1980. The fashion photographs of Guy Bourdin (1928-1991) first appeared in the pages of French Vogue in 1955. The impact of his rich colour, obscure compositions and their surreal erotic charge, became a defining look of the cultural milieu in decades to come.

Alessandro Raho was born in Nassau, Bahamas (1971) and graduated from Goldsmiths College, London (1994). Since then, Raho has exhibited on an international level including Painting on the Move at the Kunsthalle, Basel (2002), and solo shows at Cheim and Read, New York (2003) and Thaddaeus Ropac (2001 & 2003). Recent exhibitions include Raho’s Portrait of Judi Dench at the National Portrait Gallery, London (2005)

Private View: Wednesday 14 September, 6 - 8 pm

Alison Jacques Gallery
4 Clifford Street
London

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