The Silence of the Spirit

" If the Images were not, at the same time, an opening towards the transcendent, we would eventually suffocate in any culture, so big and admirable as we suppose it. From any spiritual creation stylistically and historically packaged, we can join the archetype. " Mircéa Eliade, Images and symbols.

Lover of the works of Rembrandt, Hammershoi and Wyeth, Richard T. Scott is not what we could call, an " artist of his time ". Whether you think he's inconvenient or irrelevant to the present day, one thing is sure: his work exceeds by far - both by les qualités plastiques and by the choice of its subjects - the formal expectations which compose the taste of our time. Having never given up to the sirens of malpractice and violence, his paintings open for us, instead, the doors of a world ô how much more spiritual and nuanced.

Whether it is in his portraits, his compositions, or either still in his interiors, Richard T. Scott always tries to produce, on his spectators, a certain effect of strangeness, or at least, something like a feeling of longing. That's why, maybe, his compositions are populated for the greater part with mirrors in which appear, not simply beings just like those who face us - but of real spectres having the function to destabilize our glance while giving the fourth dimension for us to see.

In his painting entitled "The Death of Uriah" for example, (God of Light) ", Richard T Scott built no less than three spaces overlapping each other: the first one is a glass door, revealing half of a scene in which a candlestick burns; in other one, the rest of this scene presenting an empty armchair; and finally, at the back, another window through which we see the silhouette of a man observing the whole composition.

By this intelligent arrangement, it is not only the story of Uriah (who king David ordered to death in order to cover up his vice of flesh) that this painter has succeeded in revealing, but more still, maybe, the atmosphere of lie and mourning in which his wife lived, having learnt of the death of her husband. A question, then, cannot but arise to those who will observe the scene attentively: who is the character lurking in the background? Would it be king David himself, contemplating the intimacy of the drama of which he is the author, or would it be the image of Uriah - innocent victim of an adultery that provoked his death?

If we cannot answer with certainty this question, nothing prevents us, on the other hand, from seeing in the empty armchair which is held in the background, Uriah's real absence, and in the candlestick being held in the foreground - the light of which reaches us only through the veil of a window - the masked guilt of king David consumed secretly by the fruits of his passion. In front of such a painting, blended with the greatest technical mastery, the intelligence of the composition, how could we not bow before  Richard T Scott's figurative genius - and to celebrate, in advance, its next compositions?

Frédéric Charles Baitinger