Richard Colombel

ahoy gallery Palma di Maillorca | http://www.ahoygallery.com/artists

Studies : 1976-1981 : Beaux-Arts de Lagny sur Marne-1981-1984 : Art graphic school/rue Madame/Paris-1985-1990 : Ecole nationale des arts décoratifs de Paris

Richard Colombel explores the limits between abstraction and figuration in his works on canvas and on paper to challenge our perception of reality. Living in Berlin since 2012, he expresses multiculturalism through his art that tends towards universality. His artistic language kindles long contemplation in which the notion of evidence is cancelled by individual projections. In Richard Colombel’s canvas, nothing or almost nothing can be recognized. The lines draw the contours of shapes and volumes modelled by the light and the result recalls the surface of collage and the angles of origamis. The artist creates relief with focused spots of brightness, alternating with dark tones, and with the slanting lines, as a reminiscence of an implicit perspective. Within the meticulously built space, the objects are stretched, shown or hidden. The field of the painting is a polymorphic reality, no longer objective and factual but subjective and individual. The viewer is but in front of his one look on the world. « The finished work asks a question that comes to no answer, this is the definition of art, which remains an artifice », considers the artist. To reach the harmony, Richard Colombel starts with chaos. « As the first step of a painting, I have to make my hand imitate randomness and spontaneity ». This is both a mental and physical state which implies full availability and awareness of the mind, a body posture, a breathing rhythm. In the first moments, shapes and figures appear naturally on the canvas: they are a necessary step in his working process. Then the painter looks for what is behind the random reproduction of the world that his hand executes mechanically, guided by the mental archetypes. As and when he applies the colours, he unveils patterns of duality, sexuality, and monstrosity. « I like working all day long to see the changes happening in my work », he adds. The last stage is reached when the composition has its own balance independently from the will of the painter: Beyond the beauty, he wants to find the right arrangement between the volumes, the lights and the lines for the painting to be an autonomous entity. The artist accomplishes the act of painting as a detachment between himself and his work. « It is not me to decide of the final result, it must appear by itself. The I shall step backward to the benefit of the art ». Richard Colombel sees humility as an essential condition to the creativity. He dispossesses himself of his work in order to open access to the viewer.At first sight, the composition seems familiar. The mind reconstitutes a landscapes, the fold of a drapery, an animal, a figure. But as soon as the eye tries to catch a detail, the forms evade and metamorphose into abstraction. « Trojan Horse », « The Little Orange Door »: the titles sound like hints in the labyrinth. The thread of resemblance is stretched until the most extreme thinness to take the perception to its limits. The values of the senses are inverted: the rational mind knows that everything should be there but the irrational eye is endlessly looking for it. The quest for this sublime balance animates Richard Colombel permanently. Even when the work is completed it is not an end in itself but tends towards a yet unexplored absolute.Richard Colombel was initiated into painting by the artists of Lyon who founded the « Sanzism », a group which rejects the categorization of the arts in movements, usually finishing whith – ism. The painter incorporates various influences, such as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso, who adore the truth within the illusion, but also Chinese calligraphy, for the purity of the movement. He also finds himself in the research for authenticity of the Cobras. Due to his study at the Art Decoratifs in Paris of sculpture, bas-relief and architecture with professors who had won the Grand Prix de Rome, the artist keeps a interdisciplinary approach of his work: « from the paint to the volume and from the volume to the space, I made art a tool to understand the world ». « ‘Come back to the line’, my teachers used to say. I still have these words in my mind today ». Since his degree completed in 1990, Paris Richard Colombel has gone far beyond their advice. In his painting as in his drawings, he transcends the line, in which he sees an autonomous entity able to bring movement, rhythm, relief and colour as well as a symbol of balance central for the artist who does meditation every day. Right after the Art Decoratifs, he retreated in a hermitage, an experience that was for him the continuity of his apprenticeship. During seven years he committed himself to the knowledge of the mind and kept himself apart from the art world. In 2012 he returns to his initial vocation as a painter and has been working since then beween Paris and Berlin. His spiritual background keeps permeating his work: « meditating simplifies the relationship between the brush and the guiding consciousness ». The hand is in constant correlation with the unstate of a pure and free mind. « Where there is no intention then everything is there. The aesthetics of the line culminates in the series « Mirror » that Richard Colombel started in 2014. With ink on paper, every detail of the structure is the results of a purely spontaneous movement. The exercise requires an extreme concentration: « I have to be careful not to interfere and let my hand gesture without any control when I trace the line ». It is the instinct in action. The balance between white and black offers an endless variety of possibilities. Every line carries at once the memory of an instant that will never come back and the potential of a present perpetually renewed by the viewer’s look. The work is a space-time fragment. The clear white margin offset the entanglement of the drawing, like a necessary transition between the order of the world and theorder of the art. « To release the line from itself by tracing a new one and a new one... Then, eventually the picture would be empty! Empty of idea but freed from all depictions ». Installed in Prenzlauer Berg Richard Colombel recently presented his works in several local and international exhibitions (Project Framed/Berlin, Home Galerie/Berlin, Meraki/Paris, Holysphere/Paris, Ahoy Galerie Palma de Mallorca, Rue Auguste Comte Gallerie/Lyon). In addition to Berlin, he also has collectors in Paris, Lyon, Hamburg, Munich and New York. Alice Delage Contact: alicedelage@gmail.com