If Richard Ducker’s previous sculptures turned the detritus of consumer culture into monuments to our obsession with things, this new work turns monumental sculptural tropes into dumb chunks of material poised precariously between ugliness and fascination.‘Blockhead’ seems to speak of rough marble as a trace of the hand of the artist, yet its grammar and syntax – from the material used, polystyrene, to the disproportionate metal ‘plinth’ from which it collapses – do not quite grasp and relay an intended meaning. Like dyslexic writing, it leaves us uncertain as to whether it is profoundly poetic or badly structured. ‘Dark Matter’ appears to quote a monochromatic tradition, but on close inspection the black shards, insulating material covered in flock, have just as much in common with the discarded props of a pre CGI sci-fi movie, when such concoctions had to make do as interstellar debris floating in deep space or the rough surface of a new planet. Too casually unfinished to convince as a plaster model, ‘Untitled’ (2010) articulates its own awkward pointlessness.Failing to resolve into either sense or nonsense, Ducker’s sculptures turn the artist’s own alienation from language into a shared bodily experience. They disturb the connection between form and meaning, between body and the ‘clean and proper self’ of a subjectivity that has fully entered into language and the semiotic, yet they do not allow us to wallow in abjection and the symbolic. In Ducker’s work, now as before, we are deceived by objects and failed by language, left in conflict between desire and meaning, daftness and poetry.Patrizia Di Bello, October 2011, Professor, School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College
Unstable Relations: the paired portraits. The idea of the double has long haunted the human imagination. The double threatens and fascinates in equal measure. Our own mirror image attracts and repels, offering a vision of the self that is both of us and yet fundamentally separate. The innate fear that our reflection – and by implication, our body – could act outside our control is an enduring terror, and therefore an abiding theme within psychology, literature and art….Eliza Williams‘Unstable Relations’ are a series of double portraits, paint on canvas, based on a single black and white photograph of the artist aged around 9 years old. There is nothing remarkable about the original photograph except that the boy (the artist) is wearing a shirt and tie and has a particularly unsympathetic haircut – yet these two features seem to take the image out of the specific and into the general: it could have been any young boy from anytime between the 1930s and the 1970s. It was this that fascinated: the implications of the specific memory of a specific moment for the artist conflated with an historicism that was as much to do with fiction, history lessons, tv and movies, as well as the archival. Suddenly I, the artist, and I, the little boy, become I, the inventor of history. Was I a member of the Nazi youth or just an over dressed little boy from the 50s, was I going to a party with my parents or dressed for church, was I a public school toff or off to work in the East End? Nostalgia and history seemed to pour out of, and into, this image. It is this movement of memory and fiction that makes the image so unstable and imprecise, and therefore curious – it is a paranoiac experience with both recall and invention having its effect. All the paintings are cropped slightly differently and with varying degrees of detail. Each pair is painted as similar as possible. This in itself is a strange experience to muster – at times intense and absurd. It both undermines and enhances the fiction that painting can get to a deeper truth – there is more depth to the painted image, but repeated, it returns to the photographic. Meanwhile the eye is constantly moving from one image to the other, looking for differences which of course exist – it is painting – a process that makes visible the impossibility of a singular moment, or at least to recall it as one. To further occupy this territory between the photographic and the painted all the paintings are given a red glaze. This has the effect of not reading them as either painting or photography, but rather as both simultaneously. The glaze also adds to their paranoiac presence while suggesting the otherness of the archive image being caught under the developer’s light – itself now a strange but magical archaic process.
The ink drawings come out of a desire to find a means of politicising the Dark Matter sculptures I had been working on at the same time, as a way of confronting the horror of the contemporary. Where the sculptures explore an alienation from language through the use of the displacement of Sci-Fi, these images come directly off the internet: news reel, mobile phone up loads, etc. They are images of smoke after explosions taken from current conflicts. Rather than trying to represent horror with horror, their scale is deliberately small (postcard size) and framed, as a means of reducing its sublime to pocket size, while returning the digital image of convenience to studied analogue. Richard Ducker, 2012
Richard Ducker has exhibited widely through out the UK and internationally, including the following: ICA, London; Kettles Yard, Cambridge; Serpentine Gallery, London; Royal Academy, Edinburgh; Mappin Gallery, Sheffield; The Yard Gallery, Nottingham; The Kitchen, New York; Flowers Central, London; Cell Project Space, London; Katherine E Nash Gallery, Minnesota, USA; Standpoint Gallery, London; Café Gallery, London; and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.
In 2006 Ducker was founder and director of Fieldgate Gallery. The space was 10,000 square feet warehouse in Whitechapel, London, and over two and half years hosted 18 exhibitions. Since the space closed in 2008 he has continued to curate under the name of Fieldgate Gallery at a variety of different venues. Information on Richard Ducker can found at www.richardducker.com and on Fieldgate Gallery at www.fieldgategallery.com.
