This has always been the primary concern in our family meetings. “Find the idea that will allow us to make something original to sell, and then gain our life with it.” Jean-Philippe Richard grew up with this concern for entrepreneurship. Eldest of a family of 4 children, he was the artist with an insatiable curiosity. “I have always been a self-taught person and I learned by practice a lot of different techniques.” He began to make mosaics with a new system he developed himself: carving stones with the natural stone of Solnhofen and painting these shapes. Then at the end of the military service, he met with a painter and opened together an art gallery in Charente Maritime, its region of origin. “I was graduated from a business school and soon I convert it into a craft shop, then a restaurant.” He then moved to Provencal Drôme, in his current studio, to embark on silkscreen printing. I did not know what to do at all, but I learned how to work with suppliers. And again, he wanted to create something different. “A system with films in silver”, to turn then to the serigraphy on glass and aluminum. In the context of his meetings, he will also produce sundials. “I wanted to make one for my terrace and with a mathematician friend, we converted learning to geometry.” He then launched an ingenious system enabling them to be etched on lithographic stones. “I was very much in technique and aesthetics and I liked the brass measuring instruments.” An aviation enthusiast, he will even set up an ULM learning school, then go into plaster molding of low-relief carvings, to finally return in 1990 to artistic creation.

There, in a sculpture workshop in Avignon, he will learn how to work the grog clay that he still uses today, and it is a revelation ! “I was trying to find shapes by letting myself be guided by matter and I got a pregnant woman.” He was at that time in southern Spain but “I knew it was my first piece of art.” And then, 27 years have passed since Jean-Philippe Richard has become a sculptor.

It is the beginning of a great adventure. “I do not know why, I began to create cylinders stacked with a head up; and it is sculpture that I still do today.” The same line. All different and all the same. Sculptures of women who are still in a finished form and under a squared base. And the contrast is striking between the slender silhouette of a woman like a stem that comes out of the raw material, as if it escapes from it. “Everything is imaginary, without any model.” The artist avoids even to be interested in the sculptures of others, for fear of loving some and being influenced.” Keeping the spontaneity of his beginnings, he ceaselessly shapes the material, with wood and some pebbles. Dozens of women appear in enameled clay, bronze or crystal and the artist starts a great paternity by giving each one a name. “Whenever I start a new piece, I say to myself: This one will be the design of the age. I’ll see the most beautiful! And when they are finished, they live; that’s why I give them a name that I like, according to the memories of the moment.”

Very sensual and delicate, they are also mysterious with expressions of their own, “and this takes shape as work progresses.” For, when the global form is finished, the artist obtains an attitude. He will then work the face according to this and above all, position the head to create an identity. Provocative, gentle, dreamy, modest, a little androgynous often and sometimes, more sexy. With their young girls side, it is the artist conception of femininity. They are also streamlined to give free rein to the dreams. Hands in the drape. Feets in the material. Eyes often closed, “because these women, facing nature, are in full meditation.” Besides, one imagines their eyes with the shadow carried by the part of the forehead “and digging more or less to change this flat and curved shape.” Then begins a whole journey so that they take their place of messengers, benevolent and protective presences, in the private or public gardens. “They will marry these places and each visitor will have his own interpretation.” It is a fundamental association of these relational sculptures and this is what makes them an art work.