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Europe

Evariste Richer
Cumulonimbus Capillatus Incus

Cumulonimbus Capillatus Incus functions in the mode of a mise en abîme: it is a cube composed of 8000 dice. The work plays with chance, each installation produces a renewed visual combination. Robert Filliou said that Eins. Un. One… (16000 dice spread on the floor, 1984) “can materialize, materializes and will materialize with no limit to the most diverse forms or combination of forms.” Richers’s sculpture acts like an encoded and pixelated image of an individual according to different layers of meaning: the weight of the work is equivalent to that of an average man (76kg); the colors of the dice recall those used in diagrams representing a codified human DNA; every choice that mankind has to make could be imagined as a roll of dice. The title of this sculpture refers to a cloud that provokes very destructive hail and thunderstorms. The sculpture is as fragile and threatening as this meteorological phenomenon—dislocation and explosion loom. In his work, the artist creates associations between dice, hailstones, and meteorites. Different levels of meaning (mankind, the climate, games) are crystallized in this artwork according to concatenation logic that creates a whole. The artist links the individual and the atmosphere, microcosm and macrocosm, in a manner close in spirit to the sociologist Edgar Morin’s concept of complexity (etymologically meaning “what is woven together”), as a web of interlacing.

Evariste Richer constantly invents new standards for measurement which are mostly objects to prompt the spectator's potential investigations: avalanche probes, a meter drawn from memory, a meter with no measurements… Meteorology, science, magic, mineralogy, photography, optics are his preferred terrains. The artist reveals meaning through displacements, changes of state such as the physical occurrence of sublimation (matter transforming from solid to gas). In Ecran (Screen, 2008), the weave of a projection screen is blown-up full-scale and takes over the entire room. Evariste Richer makes visible these micro perforations which are usually hidden by the film being projected; he reveals the infra small and ghostly. Blow up (2003), a tennis ball which has been turned in on itself, could stand as an allegory for sedimentation and concatenation. The concentration of meaning and gesture produces the artwork. The constant shifting between the cosmic and the infra small brings together knowledge and observation, certainties and the poetry of art. A piece from a meteorite can become a dice (Médéorite,  2008), a dice turning at high speed can become an illustration of the energy principle (Le grêlon noir/The Black Hailstone, 2008). Crystallisation – which was defined by Stendhal as feelings born in the imagination that become attached to an object to transfigure it – is the base of Richer's work.
Evariste Richer was born in 1969 in Montpellier, France. He lives and works in Paris.