“The title Real Allegories refers to a famous painting by Gustave Courbet showing an artist painting, surrounded by important contemporaries. In the context of my photography, ‘real allegories’ refer to the realism or illusionism of a photo and to the allegorical, that is, the constructed dimension of meaning and representation.” (Olivier Richon) Olivier Richon is concerned with themes such as the longing for the exotic, the pleasure of imitation, the meaning of an object in still life, and quotations and appropriations from art history. In his anti-naturalistic pictures time has stood still: they are devoted to the dreamlike nature of representation as frozen tableaux, want to be deciphered slowly, like hieroglyphs, yet refuse any definite interpretation.