Paul Kilsby is a British fine art photographer who began his career studying Fine Art at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the University of Wales. In 1995 he completed a PhD at the Royal College of Art exploring the subject of experimental surrealist photography in Eastern and Central Europe concentrating on the 1930s and 1940s. As part of his extensive archival research for his thesis he revisited and recontextualised the works of avant-garde artists such as Jindrich Styrsky, Jaroslav Rossler, and Frantisek Vobecky, amongst many other, whose work had been largely overlooked in Western narratives of the history of photography. Thus began his fascination with alternative methods of using photography as an art form in which reality can be presented as fiction. Drawing inspiration from the uninhibited experimentalism of these pioneer Modernist photographers, he began to mix fragments of reproductions with real objects in a series of twenty six images inspired by a child’s French Alphabet primer dating from the 1930s. This series was exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (now Modern Art, Oxford), at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art at the University of Oxford and in Perm, Russia.

Throughout his career Kilsby has been striving to look beyond traditional methods of visual expression while challenging viewers to question the way we perceive art. One of the subjects that the artist explores in his work is the ambivalent relationship between photography and paintings. In his earlier series of black and white photographs, The Seer and The Seen and After Vermeer, Paul Kilsby masterfully created unique images in which he used reproductions of master paintings and presented them in a fresh and unfamiliar context by creating small scale tableaux, freely mixing these painted images with three dimensional objects. After spending many days arranging the new composition and lighting the ensemble so that the shadows corroborate and fuse the real and the represented, Kilsby finally makes his exposure. This has become the distinctive signature of his approach. After purchasing a number of photographs for the permanent archive of the Bibiothèque Nationale in Paris, the director, Claude Lemagny wrote:  “A refined and visionary photographer, Paul Kilsby transcends the confines of different epochs in his exploration of our common cultural past. Graced by the magic of his perfect technique, these highly original photographs fuse their sources to yield new hybrid images which sustain our fascination by their visual logic.” 

The most recent series, Trompe l’Oeil, seeks to push this fusion to a further level. The tradition of trompe l’oeil painting extends back as far as the Greeks and Romans but reached its peak in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, with a further resurgence in the Nineteenth Century. These painters all sought to paint their subjects with such a degree of naturalism that the viewer might be deceived, even if only for a moment, into confusing the representation for the real thing. In Kilsby’s new photographs, the integration of reproductions and real objects is, at times, seamless. Placing the various elements into a niche concentrates the arena for this visual deception. Some of these niches are from paintings, others are constructed by the artist. Moreover, many of the elements are ‘faux’ – that is, the textures and materials are painted simulations, so that the marble spheres and cones in these photographs, for example, are not what they appear. This project calls into question traditional hierarchies of realism and decisively imperils photography’s erstwhile claim to visual truth.
Paul Kilsby’s iconography is eclectic and informed by his background in art history and theory. The subject matter for this series pays homage to the so-called Cabinets of Curiousity or Wunderkammer, showcases of the encyclopedic but erratic collections of aristocrats such as Rudolph II of Prague. These would often include taxidermy specimens, rare birds’ eggs, fossils, mathematical models, exotic religious artifacts, astronomcal apparatus, wax anatomical models, and a myriad host of other exotic oddities. Central to the phenomenon was a sense of delight in the sheer diversity of nature and culture – a wonder that Kilsby reflects in his unexpected juxtaposing of the extraordinary and the everyday, whether that be a giant Atlas moth bought in Thailand or a perfectly spherical ball of thread bought from a street market in Poland.

In his series Lux, Paul Kilsby draws upon the Dutch and Spanish traditions of the memento mori - still life paintings whose subject matter evoked a sense of mortality by making both overt and covert references to man’s mortality. In these paintings, this might be a bloom (destined to perish), a dead animal, all manner of foodstuffs, a skull, a candle, even a bubble. In the Seventeenth century, such symbols, which might sometimes strike a modern viewer as arcane, were familiar and accessible. Kilsby takes his motifs and then carefully paints them with luminous pigments. After flooding the objects with light, they are placed into total darkness where they continue to glow for several hours. It is this waning light that Kilsby collects in his camera by using long exposures – an updated version of the guttering candles seen in Dutch examples of the memento mori genre. The ghostly aura of the objects suffuses these images with an appropriately quiet melancholy.

Paul Kilsby has been specializing in making photographs for over twenty years and this has resulted in his unique recognisable style. His photographs are exquisitely crafted and executed with a sincere commitment to creating a coherent and purposeful exploration of the nature of the ways in which we see and understand the world. Like those proud owners of the Cabinets of Curiosity, he takes great delight in sharing, through photography, his fascination with exploring the world of objects and images as beautiful, strange, enchanting encounters. Each of these photographic tableaux represents a mature meditation on what finally remains the surreal which forever inhabits the real, visible to those with the imagination to see that things are never quite what they seem.