Continuing through August 9, 2025
Richard Learoyd makes large photographs with a camera obscura, creating individually unique, positive prints directly on Ilfochrome photographic paper. Up to 80 inches wide, they are large, luminous photographs, lustrously soft and immaculately detailed, with muted color palettes occasionally punctuated by vibrant reds and oranges. Learoyd has used this technique to shoot nude models, his best known work. In the past, he has turned his lens on flowers and taxidermy, and experimented with using string to segment the picture plane. Until now, the resulting somber still lifes have not constituted a major aesthetic departure. But the current show strikes out in new directions.
The pictures of flowers here differ subtly from Learoyd’s standard fare thanks in part to a collaboration with ceramicist Frances Palmer, who made the vases in which the floral arrangements were photographed. A selection of these vases, playing off of classical forms, are also on display, their lumpy, white earthenware bodies contrasting with the stark flatness of Learoyd’s pictures. Palmer’s work doesn’t steal the show, but the intentional imprecisions and organic, sensual undulations of her forms offer intriguing variation that reveals more of the artist’s hand than Learoyd’s photographs do.
Among the photographs more typical of Learoyd’s oeuvre, “Three Mackerel” evinces a striking erotic disquiet. The titular triad dangles, the fish bound together by a thin black string. Their gills peel back, perversely revealing crimson gashes beneath their scales. There is a tangible sensation of flesh that, in their sculptural nudity, Learoyd’s human figures never quite match.
It is the landscape photographs that constitute a dramatic departure for Learoyd. Two massive shots of the Grand Canyon propel us into a birds-eye view, dizzyingly packed with detail of the geographical landmark. Learoyd has shot landscapes before, but these, both taken in 2023 and printed in 2024, are perhaps his most cinematic. The vista of craggy red earth boulders surround the mouth of the gaping chasm that recedes into an opalescent blue background. Above, a band of pastel twilight sky breathtakingly recalls Renaissance-era landscape paintings, particularly those by the elder Breughel.
I’ve always thought of Learoyd as a secret painter. The type of camera obscura that he uses to make his photographs has been employed by painters since the 16th century, most famously by Jan Vermeer. Learoyd’s color palettes and the compositions of nude figures and floral arrangements invite the painterly association. And like the finest Renaissance oil paintings, their formal perfection comes at the expense of deeper emotion. Learoyd’s photographs are technical and formal masterpieces, but underneath that veneer of polished expertise, they veer towards sterility, proficient but risk averse. The most recent works here, by contrast, are his most painterly to date, and they do risk emotional exposure.
You might not realize that the three photographs of trees taken near the town of Lacock, England, are photographs at all. And, in a way, they aren’t. They were printed on primed canvas using a multi-layered printing technique. Their rough, goopy surfaces echo the naturalistic finish of Palmer’s ceramics. The result is a fuzzy wash of grey hues, trading Learoyd’s typical detail for something more varied and intriguing. Rather than the Neoclassical canvases Learoyd’s nudes recall, or the Dutch masters referenced by his flower pictures, these photographs are reminiscent of Théodore Rousseau’s murky 19th-century paintings of trees, all gnarly and trepidatious. It’s a welcome shift.
Breaking away from a well-established style or subject matter can be risky for any artist, especially one whose recognition hinges on the refinement of a signature aesthetic. Learoyd has begun the process of dispensing with meticulous decorativeness in favor of something more unpredictable and chaotic. I enjoy looking at a stridently beautiful picture as much as anyone. But I more admire the mastery of beauty that serves deeper aesthetic possibilities. Here, we catch a glimpse of that possibility, and it moves Learoyd’s work forward.
