Olivier Richon’s Images Littéraires (Literary Images) tackle the complex relationship between image and language, exploring the space between them. His exhibition confronts us with the thorny question of signs, in a dialogue between the photographs and fragments of quotations displayed on the walls of the contemporary Art centre, Circuit. In contrast with the view of the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry who, in his public address on the occasion of the 1939 centenary of photography, claimed that we might be discouraged from making further efforts to describe what photography can automatically record, Richon approaches the sign within this dichotomy.

As with the unsettling lines of asterisks in the work of Laurence Sterne, the fragmented quotations engage in a dialogue with the artist’s photographs and, as they confront each other, the distinction between the description and the recorded image begins to blur. As one makes one’s way through the exhibition – as if following a strand in the conversation between Richon and Isaline Vuille – the boundary between the text and the analogue image becomes hazy. Confronted with a photographic oeuvre reworked as a literary oeuvre in the studio, the spectator is caught in a ‘rustle’ of references that defy interpretation. From the ‘rustle of language’ to the ‘rustle of the images’, Richon’s work confounds our perception of signs.

As the viewer struggles to make sense of shots taken in the studio, and the literary fragments selected to accompany them, time expands. The setting of the photographs and their narrative immediacy create a disturbing sense of time in suspension. The feeling of suspended time evokes linguistic nuances associated with the still-life genre. The contrast between the English term ‘still life’ and the French ‘nature morte’ creates a dichotomy between mobile and immobile, animate and inanimate. This dichotomy progresses through the series and, like the crocodile in The Dream of Captain Cook (2013), the subjects photographed are revealing. The collection plays on this confusion; this duality in the perception of a subject that becomes all the more significant because the works resist interpretation.

Indeed, in bringing each of these incongruous elements together, the artist elicits a number of different ways of reading his work, irrespective of any preconceived ideas. They create a floating narrative where the eye tirelessly searches the image for clues, for signs. In this way, the composition of Literary Image (2009) can be read at different levels. Take the monkey sitting on a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Théâtre. Is it intended as an allegorical image, with the spectator replaced by a satyr? The quoted work Mound of Butter (2016), referencing Antoine Vollon’s painting of the same name (Motte de Beurre, 1875-1885), also creates narrative uncertainty The voracious viewer scrutinises the most minute detail – the traces of fingerprints left by the artist, the composition of the piece as a whole – searching for an answer to his questions.

Nevertheless, there is no established meaning to be derived from these snapshots that, in the words of André Bazin, ‘embalm time’. The eye persists in the face of infinite suspense, that of experience, taste and sensibility: an iconography at once citational and resistant. These Images Littéraires create a dialogue between textual signs and photographic signs where the viewer, immersed in a silent conversation, continues to listen for them.