Rudy Khanye
Rudy’s interest in the image as a field of narcissistic and inexistent spaces or non-spaces, in
between reflections and [lost] partial objects was exemplified in his serial works made in England, that were equally concerned with the loss of any kind of visual representation of the image itself.
What the image presented as void or elusive/ Rudy questioned the success of works of art that figure as performing a social interpolation - which proposed an over-identification within the status quo - or the symbolic order of a community - where the loss/destruction of the image, or the memory is re-enacted in terms of a collective memory.
In his photographs absence and presence often exchanged places in a way that induced melancholia as a ‘preferred’ thinking about the impossibility of a space of exchange, however as an exemplary position in [post]modernist photography. These works are composed along viewpoints that hold their distance from direct contact, often veiled or suggesting something missing [as in Antonioni’s cinematic montage for example] or no longer available to sight, or just out of sight.
Project
The Eloquence of the Absence.
"(…)And so painting remains in the service of love who was her first model. She continues to compensate the desire of lovers for the loss of their beloved objects. As the substitute for an absence, the pictorial image has all the characteristics of a sign, but it is lover’s sign born of the painful experience of lack, the only form of representation capable of satisfying a desire that seeks a presence. Unlike poetry who can only speak of absence, painting can show the one absent.
A magician, but an “innocent magician”, as Felibien says, she offers a vision of the missing object of desire in a simulacrum of its “true image”. Paintingre represents it truly, whereas Poetry merely produces simulacra of images, invisible and impalpable representations from which all presence is absent and thus where absence it’s not represented." – The Eloquence of Color: The Rhetoric and Painting in French Classical Age by Jacqueline Lichtenstein
