‘No Pre, No Con’   Galeria Moriarty Madrid  2004

In the work of Paul Eachus we are  confronted with a number  of immediate questions, or perhaps anomalies, these primarily focus on the status of the object ‘thing’ before us –  what kind of thing are we confronted by ?  Whilst these  large objects are readily identifiable as photographs,  large ‘plastic’ surfaces that conform to that ‘lack of regard’ that the photographic surface has for its subject matter there is an uncertainty as to the status of the photograph. For what we perceive is something that falls out of the canons of photographic practice, it fails to locate itself within the familiar tropes of contemporary art photography. It avoids the subtlety  of nuanced light effects or the richness of photographic space, it owes more to the arena of catalogue photography – furniture catalogues and mail order books.  The light is frontal and clearly studio based, there is a harsh banality to the colour.  Similarly what is suggested is that the photograph plays the role of  documentation, the recording of an object –   a structure or series of structures  that exist  in  another  place  in  the  present or  the past  for which  only this inadequate photographic recording exists. This is further emphasised by the cropping process in which, for example, an ongoing event within the built space is severed and partially edited out, we see only a fragment of an event, of which the whole operates outside the frame. So are we looking at a documentation of a physical structure or is what we perceive as a photograph the work itself; this ambiguity seems central to Eachus’s work ?

We are presented, perhaps even propositioned by a series of events, something has taken place,  is about to take place or is  in the process of  taking place. Each event then is in process, not static but in a moment of becoming, it is in this sense transitory; it is  unstable. This state of  affairs is  further complicated  by a seeming  lack of awareness  between events. This space  lacks  any sense  of rational coherence and fails to  account for  the events  going on  within its  parameters. This is not however a chaotic,  out of  control situation  but one  in which  the boundaries  of things are traversed in order to propose new relationships, relationships formed between unlikely partners.  It evokes Deleuze’s notion of  ‘delire’,  the ‘straight furrows’ fixed by society’s processes of categorisation and the channelling  of things into their bracketed places are  ruptured and  the perverse and  the irreconcilable  are given  the space to form new dialogues.

There is in  this  ‘space to form new dialogues’  a particular politics at work, in the first instance  as a kind of  contemporary existentialism, ‘an escaping without leaving’, a resistance  to the shackling and  controlling power of a  capitalist hegemony which in its rhetoric of human freedom  becomes increasingly less liberal and egalitarian and more restrictive  under the banner of internal  security from external aggressors. Interwoven into this situation is the rise of nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms and their attendant  moral  imperatives.  Eachus’s  photoworks and  displays operate to antagonise and  irritate disrupting  the smooth flow  of things in order to  emphasise a notion of becoming, a multi directional  immanence that has the potential to ‘burst out’ at any point and at any time. The unlikely partnership between elements of  difference provoke the possibility for new formations and debates.