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Published in TATE etc , January 2011
John Riddy’s large colour photographs of London are in obvious contrast to the emphasis on the rural and marginal elsewhere. Two of them have an oblique connection to the Romantics, though they also suggest how quickly traces are erased in the modern city. London(Wapping) 2008 shows some of the real estate on the thoroughly madeover waterfront. This is post-picturesque all right, and a far cry from the place to which Turner liked to retreat (he had property here, too, a pub called The Ship and Bladebone). London(Bank) 2008 is a flat blank wall with a statue of John Soane in a niche. Soane worked on his designs for the Bank of England for more than 40 years, and the result was his masterpiece; it proved an ephemeral monument, however, and hardly any of his fabric remains. Through his attentiveness to surfaces, Riddy reveals a city of many losses.
Published in Source: The Photographic Review, Summer 2009
[Riddy’s] photographs have a stillness, a mesmerising quality that is only partly the result of an absence of people and events. In ‘London (Marylebone)’, for instance, we see the underside of the A40 Westway. The frame is filled with detail, democratically but asymmetrically ordered, which sustains our attention through the process of repeat discovery, and yet the structure has a clarity and openness. The scene has depth but minimal layering: the image calms; it does not confuse.
Related Exhibitions: JOHN RIDDY: LOW RELIEF Photographs of London
Published in Artforum, Summer 2009
So is Riddy a romantic or a realist? That such an uncertainty can exist is a function of the extreme subtlety of this photographer’s image-world. Exploring muted ranges of color and tone, and often representing unremarkable locations that would never make it into any tourist guide to London… the ten landscape-format color photographs that comprise “Low Relief” invite descriptors such as “quiet,” “subdued,” or even “self-effacing.” ‘London (Weston Street), 2009’, offers the most extreme example. The evenly dark-toned picture of part of a railway arch near London Bridge station in essence, an invitation to stare at a brick wall… Janus-like, the image has two faces, one dingy and banal and the other unexpectedly beautiful.
Related Exhibitions: JOHN RIDDY: LOW RELIEF Photographs of London
Published in Art Review, May 2009
“I’ve made a conscious effort to take perspective our of the pictures”, [John Riddy] says; “I think it’s an attempt to use a more ‘primitive’ way of composing the image so that you end up with something more guttural, where flat planes are suspended in a different pictorial space.” The resuld is a London that seems built out of stage flats of trompe l’oeil hoardings, a city fabric made of grey facades on which are inscribed the traces of alternate histories.
Related Exhibitions: JOHN RIDDY: LOW RELIEF Photographs of London
Published in Time Out London, 24 March 2009
John Riddy is known for his formally rigorous and chromatically complex photographs of monuments and places. His wry, art-referential framing of man-made and natural world phenomena – from brutalist flyovers to painterly renaissance skies – conceals myriad overlooked details. London becomes the subject of Riddy’s fascination with texture – as material facet of the everyday urban experience and a less tangible spatial state of play.
In these, the people-free scenes of an elegantly edited dérive, the city appears a visually rich sculptural playground littered with narrative possibilities.
http://www.timeout.com/london/art/event/24152/john-riddy.html
Related Exhibitions: JOHN RIDDY: LOW RELIEF Photographs of London
Published in Guardian, 4 April 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2005/apr/04/1
Related Exhibitions: Eccentric Spaces
Published in Time Out, April 2005
Related Exhibitions: Eccentric Spaces
Published in The Independent, 10 February 2004
John Riddy has always been concerned with the poetics of space, with the relationship between photography and architecture, spatial illusion and dreaming. His interiors and landscapes, along with the cityscapes he photographs, are devoid of human presence. Whether they are brightly lit offices or a shepherd’s hovel in the arid plains of South Africa, they represent the traces of human presence, the evidence that we leave of our various lives.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20040210/ai_n12765544
Published in Time Out, February 2004
Published in British Journal of Photography, 2003
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