Richard Pak
FRANCE
Instagram @richardpakfr
Richard Pak's work, organized in series or episodes, is built empirically, without dogma or program, and without systematicity. However, as with any artist, it is evident that the body of work is structured around major concepts and adapted formal research. Thus, Richard Pak has developed his own "way" more or less intuitively. There are no effects, but rather a relationship between bodies, forgetting one's own presence to reveal the existence of the other. This is the very idea of photography, which is explored without a facade of stylistic coherence or an invariant process that would warrant an aesthetic endorsement. Here, realism is required, there, symbolism, and elsewhere, metaphor. Whether the approach is experimental and plastic, classical and documentary, sociological and fictional, Richard Pak asserts his freedom of expression. For what is at stake is underground, at the very depths of what shapes his representation of the world: the oceanic feeling, late modernity, the power of emotions, and the embodiment through images. The necessity of seeing life to exist.
Text by Michel Poivert
• SERIES •
The Wrecked Island
Nauru, in Oceania, has gone from being the richest country in the world to one of the poorest in less than twenty years. Its history could be a literary fiction where folly of grandeur and greed have transformed a paradisiacal island into an ecological, economic and social disaster. The wrecked Island takes on the trappings of a metaphorical tale to depict one of the great disasters of the 20th century. The series points to the allegorical dimension of the smallest republic on Earth, a treasure island that might have been better off leaving it buried underground.
With the support of CNAP, Fondation des Artistes, Prix photographie et Sciences.
