RICHARD RENALDI – MANHATTAN SUNDAY
2016-11-21Manhattan Sunday is a photographic diary from 2010 to the present. As the name suggests, the pictures were all taken in Manhattan, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, usually after a night out on the town. If hedonism informs these images, from the bare skin and muscled bodies in many of its portraits, to the disco balls and bottles of poppers in its still lifes, it’s a sensuality tempered by reflection. The faces are blissed out, maybe even a bit wan after eight or ten hours of clubbing. Black and white lends a coolness to the scenes, merging day with night, while several long exposures capture the euphoria of the club experience, but also its transience.
“It was in these serene moments,” Renaldi writes, “leaving the clubs, totally spent, that a new city revealed itself to me.” Renaldi is renowned for his portraits, most prominently in the acclaimed series Touching Strangers, which communicates a rich sense of its subjects’ inner lives in just a few almost unnoticeable details. That same nuance is on display here, whether it’s the Offer Nissim ball cap that shades the eyes of a wasp-waisted young man whose T-shirt dangles from his pants, or the feminine curl of a single dark lock snaking across the clipped chest hair of a set of sculpted pecs. Yet it’s New York that lends these portraits their unique resonance—Manhattan, represented here in a large quadtych of the borough’s ever more crowded skyline, in which thousands of lights blaze from hundreds of buildings, simultaneously evocative and anonymous.
Opposite – 7:35
Exhibition runs through to December 23rd, 2016
Benrubi Gallery
41 East 57th Street 13th Floor
New York
NY 10022
