In the photographs of Ricky Barel (@rickybarel), the world is reduced to an elementary relationship: a subject and a background. There’s no visual clutter, no excess elements to distract the eye, only a figure, human or architectural, isolated against a flat, uniform surface that functions almost like a theatre backdrop. It’s a photography born from a continuous gesture of subtraction, where each shot feels like the result of visual cleaning rather than addition.

A man reading a newspaper while floating in water, only his head and feet emerging from a perfectly still, milk-coloured surface. A figure in a kimono standing before two identical ATMs, cut out against a bright red wall that fills nearly the entire frame. A Sicilian balcony suspended against cream-coloured plaster, its cast shadow rendered with the same graphic precision as the object itself. In each of these images the subject seems almost applied on top of the background, producing an effect that is at once photographic and illustrative, helped along by the choice of uniform surfaces that flatten out any sense of depth.

Ricky Barel also frequently works from elevated perspectives, where human figures, undisputed protagonists of the frame when seen at eye level, shrink into small elements that become part of larger patterns. They’re no longer isolated individuals in the frontal sense of the word, but tiles within a bigger composition, points of colour or contrast arranged and observed with the same attention one might give to an abstract drawing. He also favours negative space, letting emptiness carry the same compositional weight as fullness, and uses natural colours without forcing saturation.

Barel’s stated goal is to create images that invite the viewer to pause, to slow down their gaze and discover beauty in simplicity. In a photographic landscape often dominated by the pursuit of immediate visual impact, his work instead offers a slower, almost contemplative kind of viewing, one where the pleasure comes from the essentiality of the composition rather than the spectacle of the subject.