Samuel Richardot

Since graduating from the Paris art school in 2006, Samuel Richardot has been working with Balice Hertling in Paris, where he had a one man show in 2008. He followed up the same year with the Printemps de Septembre festival in Toulouse, France.

At La Galerie he will be presenting new paintings dating from his recent stay in Berlin, together with a large paper installation.

From the very beginning, Richardot has drawn from expression of sensory qualities, each element finding a possible origin into a fragrance, a touch, a sound, etc.: kinds of resurgences that his memory associates to senses. Yielding painting that is figured without being figurative, the vocabulary furnished by these "mental" images – mental in that they depict a virtual reality – is a run-through of strangely familiar symbols we cannot quite pin down. Some are taken from the medical repertoire – bodily organs – while others are natural entities like branches, puddles and stones reduced to their simplest state. More recent additions to the Richardot practice are the outcome of such painting-related gestures and incidents as runs, stains, bubble wrap prints, sticky tape, burns, etc.: controlled accidents conjuring up a history of process art.

The exhibition at La Galerie fans out from a hanging of works in which motifs painted on canvas are to be found side by side with paper cut-outs. Deliberately subjected to the constraints inherent in the use of standard formats – either large and horizontal (such as landscapes and screens) or very small – Richardot's works juggle with changes of scale: from picture as overview to the detail of each element depicted. Because emptiness looms large in these works, the forms seem to emerge from a blank field. Clearly contoured yet at the same time left incomplete, they are created without any preliminary drawings; the result is works driven by a quest for spontaneity while remaining, paradoxically, highly controlled.

--press release, 2009, La Galeri, Noisy-le-Sec

EDUCATION

2006           D.N.S.A.P., Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris


SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2009           La Galerie, Noisy Le Sec
2008           Balice Hertling, Paris


SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2008           Le Printemps de Septembre, BBB, Toulouse, France
                        Rendez-vous, Shanghai Art Museum, China
2007           Rendez-vous 07, Les Subsistances, Lyon
                        Cadrage/Débordement: Exposition des Félicités de l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris
2006           51e Salon de Montrouge
                        "Nicolas Guiet - Samuel Richardot, lauréats du Prix Novembre a Vitry 2006", Vitry-sur-Seine
                        Prix Novembre à Vitry, Vitry-sur-Seine


PRIZES

2007           Prix Jeune Espoir Nicolas Feuillate
                        Prix Jean Chevalier
2006           Prix Spécial du Jury, 51e salon de Montrouge
                        Prix Novembre a Vitry, Vitry - sur - Seine