ELASTOGENESE 05 Richard Texier

“He seeks the 'vanishing point' (1992), 'the continent of the angel' (1993). To accomplish his goal, he becomes an astronomer, a navigator, absorbs the traces of Vasco de Gama, Magellan, Copernicus, then scrambles the maps, surrounds himself with cabalistic signs, strolls, lets himself be "filled by the void". It stretches the distances. And, supreme paradox, the meaning of the world emerges like a revelation, an alchemy from the night of time. Some webs look like microscopic cross-sections of cells from the earth's earliest days. Texier, the shaman, has supernatural powers. No need for mescal, peyote, hallucinogenic mushrooms, to enter a trance. The smell of seaweed, the sea breeze, is enough for him. He captures the origin of time, infinity, invisible territories, pendulum movements, ancestral fears with a minimalist watchword, again taken from one of his paintings, "Regarde l'infime". The treasure hunt can then start. Wherever he is, in his refuge on the Ile de Ré, in the Cordouan lighthouse, in a New York loft, in Tokyo, Moscow or Shanghai, he carries this hair-raising firepower in his suitcases. »

Serge Raffy, Richard Texier, les îles de la destinée

ARTIST

Richard Texier is a French painter and sculptor born in Niort on June 28, 1955. He lives and works in Paris, in the Butte-aux-Cailles district.

The artist has been painting diligently since the age of 12. He shared his childhood between the Atlantic coast and the Poitevin marshes, two universes that deeply marked his work.

From 1977, Richard Texier developed a work integrating fragments torn from landscapes and nature, which he completed with narrative elements. He often draws his inspiration from found objects, loaded with an unknown story, around which he develops a work on the material which gives them a strangely primitive aspect.

More about Richard Texier

Work

“Nature is careful. She strives to hide her methods under the splendor of her productions. The wonder, the beauty, the diversity of the forms she invents, are in reality strategies of dissimulation. Art, by mimicry, proceeds in the same way. He surprises, shocks, dazzles, captures attention to impose his views underground, establish his most radical theses, his most refined models. In the past, Ingres, whom the surrealists adored, distorted the silhouettes of the figures he painted. He added vertebrae to the back of his odalisques, dilated languid bodies and voluptuous flesh. Yet these anatomical lies told the elastogenic truth of the world. »

Richard Texier, about his Elastognese theory, which he invented in 2014