John Riddy: Horizon
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Frith Street Gallery is pleased to present Horizon, an exhibition of new work by John Riddy. Returning time and again to specific locations, Riddy is interested in the transformation that occurs when the familiar world is described as a photograph on paper.
John Riddy shot his new series of photographs from a single viewpoint that looks toward Blakeney Point and the North Sea along the Norfolk Coast Path. Though seemingly remote, the subject of the Blakeney series is not only a place that Riddy has visited for over 30 years but a common walking path and an everyday experience for thousands of people. The horizon, which carefully bisects the composition in each picture, indicates a shingle ridge that protects the marsh from the North Sea. The ridge is disrupted by a single building known as the Watch House, originally built in the nineteenth century as a lookout for smugglers. For Riddy, this particular viewpoint, and its description in a series of photographs, is informed by an accumulation of his impressions and his deep familiarity with the setting.
While Horizon presents a new body of work and subject matter for Riddy, the Blakeney series adopts formal and thematic tropes found in earlier works. The equal division between land and sky, for example, echoes the composition of the New York (Black Star) series (2016), taken from a hotel window, looking out across Manhattan towards the Whitney Museum. Indeed, both bodies of work also capture a single viewpoint in meticulous detail as it changes over a period of time – for Black Star, a series of pictures over 24 hours; for Blakeney, the series was made over two years.
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‘I am trying to make sure that the whole print is as alive without shouting as I can possibly get it. I think I've used the phrase in previous interviews ‘screaming silently’. So, trying to get a tension into the image, but without any overt drama.’
– John Riddy
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Blakeney (1), 2021Although Riddy shot the Blakeney series at a particular place, the chief impulse behind the work is formal experimentation, a goal shared by many landscape painters, from John Constable to Philips Koninck to Claude Monet. In Koninck’s A Panoramic Landscape with a Country Estate (1649) the stark divide between the roiling clouds and the golden-green foreground echoes the structure of the photographs in the Blakeney series. Koninck based his work on the direct experience of the Dutch landscape, but the paintings are composites – fictional vistas imagined anew in the studio. Likewise, for Riddy, the time spent in the studio after taking the photographs on site is of equal if not greater importance. For both Riddy and Koninck, the landscape genre offers a space for play where subtle shifts in light and atmosphere occupy their imagination.
Philips Koninck, A Panoramic Landscape with a Country Estate, 1649
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blakeney (9), 2022
In contrast to Koninck who often conjured vast landscapes from imagination, the realism of John Constable’s paintings is rooted in a deeply personal relationship with place. Born and raised in Suffolk, the artist repeatedly returned to the same locations, making sketches on site before returning to his studio to work on the final canvas. Having trained originally as a painter, Riddy’s approach to the Blakeney series reflects a similarly devotional working method, returning to one specific point along the Norfolk Coast Path over the course of 20 visits, before fastidiously reworking the images in the studio. Unlike previous works by the artist, the Blakeney pictures are all single frames, and carefully selected from 1,500 files. The resulting works are intensely detailed while also retaining a systematic and harmonious relationship with one another, drawing the viewer into the vast, timeless horizon of the English landscape.
John Constable, Ploughing Scene in Suffolk, 1824–25
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Blakeney (8), 2021
One of the great landscape painters of the Western tradition, Caspar David Friedrich often depicted the everyday terrain near his home in Dresden. Yet his landscapes are suffused with an otherworldly atmosphere, evoking a sense of mystery, or the divine. The Great Enclosure (1832) depicts a section of the River Elbe, with a variegated dusk reflected in foreground pools of water. In Riddy’s Blakeney (8) 2022, the high tide has overcome the grasses, creating patches of water that reflect the cool, grey light of the sky. We see a setting familiar to the artists in both pictures, yet by emphasising the horizon and the contrasts between earth and sky, Riddy and Friedrich construct a dialogue between the particular and the infinite.
Caspar David Friedrich, Das Große Gehege bei Dresden, 1832
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'I was thinking about the place I wanted to make in here [the gallery] rather than just my memory and response I might have had walking around out there.'
– John Riddy
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Blakeney (6), 2021
The Blakeney series is as much an interrogation of time as it is place, capturing a single, consistent viewpoint that the artist revisited over the course of two years. Each resulting photograph is attached to a specific moment, tracing the effects of time, weather and shifting light, describing those temporal changes in silence and stillness. In Blakeney (6), 2022 the incoming rainfall drives across the frame from left to right, engulfing the comparatively minute Watch House before pressing into the clear sky beyond. Riddy has referenced the influence of Rembrandt’s 1643 etching The Three Trees in which the moody sky dominates the picture plane, dwarfing the minutiae of human activity below. The steadfast trees, by comparison, endure, as does the vibrant grass in Riddy’s photographs. The immediacy and proximity of Blakeney (6), 2022 transports the viewer into the throes of the storm, much the same as Rembrandt’s etching.
Rembrandt, The Three Trees, 1643
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Blakeney (7), 2022
Gustave Le Gray’s work has long been a source of influence for John Riddy. It began when the artist came across a photograph by Le Gray of Palermo in the aftermath of Garibaldi’s battle to take control in 1860, which inspired him to create a series of the same Italian city between 2012–16. Riddy’s fascination lies in what he has referred to as ‘an expanded timescale’ that also pervades the nineteenth-century photographer’s seascapes. This dramatic division of land and sky is paralleled in the Blakeney series where each photograph reduces the landscape to its simplest parts. By focussing intensely on the textures of the windswept grassland, set against the ever-shifting sky, Riddy dislocates the series from any specific time or place, constructing an environment within the gallery that is charged with rhythm and intensity.
Gustave Le Gray, Brig on the Water, 1856
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'I really loved the presence those works [Brice Marden, terre verte paintings] had together in the gallery; the way they were formally aligned reminded me of a horizon. I started to wonder if it might be possible to do something similar with a sequence of photographs, to have a horizon line that went round the gallery.'
– John Riddy
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The initial spark behind the Blakeney series was Riddy’s experience of seeing an exhibition of Brice Marden’s terre verte paintings. Exploring the permutations of a single pigment by different paint manufacturers, Marden created a series of paintings with strong horizons in a range of greens. Riddy adopted this systematic approach, swapping pigment for a single viewpoint. The Blakeney series opened up a controlled space where the artist could explore modulations in colour, tone and texture, values associated with abstract art. Yet a photograph is never wholly abstract.
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Blakeney (5), 2022
Alfred Stieglitz was among the first to look at the potential for abstraction in photography and his Equivalents series – photographs of clouds – is a touchstone for Riddy, whose Sky series pays homage to his predecessor. With Equivalents, Stieglitz wanted to remove the photograph from its attachment to narrative or portraiture, creating a space that would emphasise the subjectivity of both artist and viewer over subject matter. With the exhibition Horizon Riddy would like to conjure a unique sense of space in the gallery – a space that, above all, is conjured anew in the mind of each viewer.
Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1930 and Equivalent, 1927
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Installation photography: Stephen White & Co.
