Strikingly intimate in their clarity, British photographer Richard Learoyd’s new portrait and still life photographs at Pace Gallery arrest with their beauty and rich color. Here, however, Learoyd eliminates saturated tones to allow the focus to rest on the texture and minute details of two subjects. Viewers standing in the gallery corner before these two photos are brought into an unexpected relationship with the thoughtfulness, possibly inflected by melancholy or ire, of the sitters. Created with his signature room-sized camera obscura, Learoyd himself is not immediately in front of the subjects as he takes the photo, adding to the sense of interiority in the images. (On view in Chelsea through April 26th).
