Ricciardi’s work unearths the Existential Tonality of our time, exposing its different attunements and individuations going beyond the conventional view of modern life as defined mainly by anxiety. He does this from a context of his own lived experiences with collectivity and rural life as well as documenting the impacts of technology and economic change in recent times. Despite its humour and playfulness, Ricciardi’s work acknowledges an uncanny and disturbing inflection to contemporary life, which he depicts through nearly-deformed cyborg-monsters and other post-human beings who are only slowly becoming aware that they are not who they think they are. But these paintings are not judgmental, they are rather an attempt to see ourselves clearly and to even propose this ‘monsterism’ as a critical mode of being; of amplifying and over saturating our notions of time and action.
For the installation of Lazy Time, Riccardi has scattered a series of soft sculptures of smoked cigarettes throughout the spaces as if the exhibition is taking place in a waiting-room ashtray. Ricciardi portrays moments of intimacy, aloneness, as well as collective and social encounters, as distractions and passing time; smoking, sitting on the toilet doom scrolling, and hanging-out taking selfies. The characters of this world are exhausting themselves in pastimes and entertainment in more and more futile attempts to escape a profound boredom which threatens to destabilise how they bring meaning and value into their lives. This is not a boredom with things, but a more profound boredom that saturates and makes visible contemporary life.
By trying to escape this omnipresent boredom, the characters in Lazy Time, fill their time with meaning-surrogates, endless information-streams and the merely “interesting”. They are fatigued and on the verge of becoming unfit for normal life and are already hardly distinguishable from the detritus that is strewn around them. But perhaps what we are witnessing is not people wasting time by not pursuing useful careers, or building families etc, but the awakening of a deep Boredom that prepares the mind for visionary insight; that lets us understand time as time, and opens us to a new frontier landscape of The Boreing. Pacôme Ricciardi synthesises an existential proposition about modern life with the political question about how we might go forward in a world that can no longer sustain the meanings we assumed it held for us. Lazy Time is not simply a critique of wasted life, but a philosophical and political meditation on what comes after the collapse of conventional meaning.
