On the occasion of Alexis Ralaivao: Éloge de l’ombre (In Praise of Shadows), the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, The Kasmin Review presents an original essay by critic Ingrid Luquet-Gad. Below, Luquet-Gad examines Ralaivao’s recent turn to black and white and the propensity for his tightly-cropped compositions to ease the overstimulation of daily life. Éloge de l’ombre (In Praise of Shadows) remains on view at 509 West 27th Street through July 25, 2025.
“I am really drawn to simplicity. It has always been part of my process, but this time, I wanted to push it further,”(1) Alexis Ralaivao muses as he walks back and forth between his recent works. The artist’s vast studio, a repurposed 19th-century apartment bearing the marks of a faded splendor, is filled with large-scale oil paintings in a muted palette of smooth black and white. There, Ralaivao’s characteristically fluid, almost dissolving, brushstrokes blend in with the salt-infused air of Rennes, the peaceful town where the artist was born and where he recently returned.
In this new series, Ralaivao extends the scope of his signature style. The study of distinction explored in his 2023 exhibition at Kasmin (On s’enrichit de ce que l’on donne, on s’appauvrit de ce que l’on prend) and the intimate, domestic portraiture of the artist’s early period remain present. In the black and white portraits, however, his use of tightly cropped details becomes a narrative device. As our eyes start to wander along their evanescent surfaces, we forget about the rational world. Something is looming: we begin to fantasize endlessly. This can be seen in L’Énigme de L’Ombre, a cinematographic view of a single, illuminated eye in the dark. In this series, the artist has assembled references from various sources, drawing from art history as well as pop culture to complexify the atmosphere’s construction. Inside the picture frame, these references blur, creating a new milieu veiled in mystery and promises. The viewer becomes the subject of a plot that asks to be elucidated yet remains perpetually elusive.
Ralaivao’s decision to focus on black and white started as a painterly challenge. The artist spent the summer of 2024 exploring the world of classic cinema. With a deep, insatiable drive for images, he immersed himself in the film noir era of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as contemporary interpretations of the genre. Paul Thomas Anderson’s period film Phantom Thread (2017), for instance, is a lush portrayal of midcentury London through a couture dressmaker. Historical sources such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), and the later, unfinished classic Inferno (1964) by Henri-Georges Clouzot stood out for their minimal plots, thick with impending danger, which allow the viewer to focus intently on details and perspectives. This is precisely what caught the artist’s attention, and is what shapes the show’s general mood. The paintings, just like these movies, achieve dramatic tension through elliptical framing and chiaroscuro lighting.
An avid drawer from an early age, Ralaivao initially wanted to become an illustrator but chose not to pursue academic art training. This led him to embrace a free-form approach, experimenting across different media and historical genres. The artist, born in 1991, grew up in the wake of art’s dematerialization, at a moment when all the world’s images were being reproduced and shared through digital media. Art historian David Joselit would characterize it as the era of “image explosion.”(2) Being self-taught, in this respect, does not mean that he ignores the classical art history canon, but rather that he is not constrained by a linear tradition. As everything is now accessible, the artist can draw from sources as diverse as Dutch Golden Age masters, 20th-century Italian artists such as Domenico Gnoli, Giorgio Morandi, or, more recently, the melancholic Swedish colorist Mamma Andersson. He usually paints from staged photographs that he takes himself and for which he asks friends and family to pose. His various sources, gathered through a non-hierarchical research process, are thus always reworked through his subjective filter.
“It is important to me that the painting is an object and not just an image,”(3) Ralaivao adds. He favors a traditional, time-consuming approach to his craft and starts with a yellow ground, followed by an oil sketch layered with a grisaille, and finally several layers of paint. This methodical process is key to what makes his work both aware of the contemporary experience and intensely personal. His research, fast-paced and wide-ranging, lets the decelerated temporality of painting take center stage, as it, for us, allows the suspended space of immersion to settle in. Today, several modes of attention coincide as they simultaneously shape our experience, none essentially better than the other.(4) Only, it is increasingly difficult to experience them when our total techno-social infrastructure is engineered for efficiency rather than depth. Ralaivao’s use of cropped close-ups can be seen as both a generational and subjective marker, a way of emphasizing that a distracted gaze can still achieve agency—and that art helps guide our focus. “Through details, one can concentrate on doing one thing well,” explains Ralaivao. “Maybe it reflects the times we live in, translating a need to simplify the information at hand.”(5)
In the 20th-century French tradition of hermeneutics, the detail already possesses a rich genealogy. Daniel Arasse, a leading historian of painting, wrote extensively on the idea of the “detail.” In his 1992 essay Le Détail, he argues that the detail, often overlooked, suggests a connection between seeing and knowing. It creates, according to Arasse, a “figurative framework,” as well as specific unity of meaning that takes place directly through the materials. Ralaivao zooms in on ordinary or overlooked items, or moments that possess no narrative information per se yet reveal a complex knot of sensations: we feel anticipation, longing, suspense or tenderness beyond verbal language. The detail introduces an intimate, subjective perception and therefore escapes algorithmic management and analytical data.
Ralaivao’s tightly cropped scenes feel almost counter-intuitive: we are used to easily legible representations intended to deliver their information seamlessly. This is precisely where art happens: instead of subjecting us to the rapid-fire pace of information, the paintings invite us to slow down. Their framing is not only determined by informational systems, such as the reductive grid of social media, but they also recall a long lineage of art criticism analyzing how perceptual patterns influence representation—from Jonathan Crary “suspensions of perception,”(6) analyzing how industrialization birthed a new, more easily distracted observer, to Claire Bishop’s recent concept of “disordered attention,”(7) hinting at a hybrid, interpersonal and mediated spectatorship. Ralaivao’s pared-down paintings do not just evoke or fantasize about a simpler, more contemplative past: they use shared cultural references to propose sensory recalibration as an antidote to the overstimulation of our daily lives.
Screening
Alexis Ralaivao
Echoes Of Darkness
A new film directed by Thomas Gerard takes viewers into Ralaivao’s studio for a behind-the-scenes look at the development of his latest suite of oil paintings.
Alexis Ralaivao has staged solo and two-person exhibitions at Kasmin, New York (2023), Nahmad Projects, London (2024); T293, Rome (2022); Bill Brady Gallery, Miami (2022); and ATM Gallery, New York (2020). He has participated in group exhibitions at LGDR, Hong Kong (2022); Timothy Taylor, London (2021) and Anat Egbi, Los Angeles (2021), among others. His work is held by the He Art Museum, China; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas, and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, among other collections. Ralaivao was honored at the Fundación Callia’s 10th Edition of the International Patronage Awards in Madrid, Spain, in early 2025. He has been represented by Kasmin since 2024.
Ingrid Luquet-Gad is an art critic, researcher and lecturer based in Paris. She is currently a doctoral candidate in art history and media theory at UNIL – Université de Lausanne, where she is working on a collectivist, para-institutional history of post-internet art. She was in charge of the arts section of Les Inrockuptibles and has been a regular contributor to Artforum, Cura, Flash Art International, and Spike Art Magazine. She teaches philosophy of art at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and art theory at ÉCAL/École cantonale d’art de Lausanne.
Notes
(1) Interview with the artist, December 3, 2024.
(2) David Joselit, After Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
(3) Interview with the artist.
(4) This is a central point made by art historian Claire Bishop in her recent study Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance, London/New York: Verso, 2024. See for instance: “Today I switch rapidly between different modes of attention. In a typical visit to an exhibition, I’ll get lost in long periods of focus and presence,” p. 13.
(5) Interview with the artist.
(6) Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts/London: The MIT Press, 2001.
(7) Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance, London/New York: Verso, 2024.
