Richard Garet: vibrations of images and sounds

by Valentino Catricalá, Ph.D.
Contemporary Art Curator
Director of the Art Section at Maker Faire – The European Edition – Rome Chamber of Commerce

Richard Garet is an artist interested in the evolution and the experience of art that has integrated into the digital file, transposing the medium’s own natural distinct and significant constructs while also imposing its own virtual experiential condition. This condition articulates a realm of aesthetics unequivocally glorifying the apprehension of the screen’s luminous emission, the sight through evolving technologies, and the ethereal surface of the screen ultimately merging all mediums.

In his long-running and varied artistic career, Richard Garet has been digging into perceivable reality, minutely intercepting the everyday life vibrations of images and sounds. By questioning the process of perception in contemporary society, he treats technology as an experiential filter, though which we acquire information, but nevertheless use it to express, manipulate, and direct impulses.

The work of Garet can take many shapes, from sound installation to sculpture to video. The sound became something to know, to make physical, to see. This is evident in works such as 30 Cycles of Flux (2012) where wires hooked to speakers create a flux of movements depending on the sound.

The technological mediation stays at the base of varied experimentations, which share the common intent of the amplification of the real, so to move the focus on the unheard buzz of life. In some of his artworks, such as Quotidian (2017), sound is isolated and reproduced; while another current of his work is based on the creation of synesthetic experiences is which sound is converted into images. In these contexts, both sound and images are literally “abstracted” from their context and acquire their centrality. The process of visualization of sound stays as a sort of poetical translation in which it is possible to recognize different echoes of art history. The cross references to the studies of Bauhaus, as well as the interest for pictorial abstraction, reverberate in his audiovisual pieces, in which the presence of public usually play a central role, by activating and influencing the evolution of the works.

Richard Garet established himself as a reference for arts and new technologies, confirming the growing interest of artists and cultural workers for the future possibilities contamination. In its last project, for instance, he investigates the possibilities connected to crypto art or NFTs.