Benedict Redgrove: Everything & Nothing
Display Gallery, London, 15 – 18 April 2016
To describe Benedict Redgrove’s pictures as cloudscapes is both to offer an accurate characterisation and to make an obscene understatement. Somewhere beneath is the minuscule Earth and somewhere above is the unfathomable cosmos, but the image only shows the infernal mist of the clouds, tranquil and yet lonely. But they are also mere abstractions, lilting, billowing and perfectly still in a space that is neither earth nor sky, beyond man and time. The pictures’ immaculate sense of detail possesses the charm of painterly precision, achieved through the serendipity of a fleeting moment that echoes a long lost thought or feeling. Redgrove’s mastery of the camera and sensitivity to the translucent relationship between the image and the world, gives these pictures an all-consuming atmosphere of searching contemplation. It is as if a photograph can never capture the world as acutely as it reflects the inner life of the photographer, which is the ultimate source of the profound calm of this vast everything and nothing.
Display Gallery is proud to present a series of expressionist cloudscapes by photographer Benedict Redgrove. This body of work, shot during various long haul flights over a five year period, features 22 large format Giclée prints.
Captured at high altitude, on hundreds of journeys over the course of five years, Everything & Nothing is both a portrait of the artist and an exploration of landscape. Bringing together a personal journey and a sense of place, Redgrove’s photographs suggest a formal minimalism which thinly veils an abstract expressionist backdrop. A chance for reflection, or escape.
Everything & Nothing charts Redgrove’s creative development through subtle variations in tone and atmosphere. He invites the viewer to be immersed in the moment, free from instruction or prescription, an enticement to dream, ponder. Or to just be. Celebrating nothing.
