Evariste Richer (b. 1969 Montpellier, France) lives and works in Paris.
By measuring, mapping, classifying, and archiving, man has invented plenty of methods and systems for reducing the world to his human scale. Although the history of art and of the sciences seems to reflect the procession of human conquests with a great sense of partnership, Evariste Richer’s work diverts our eye fixed on the rear-view mirrors of our norms to reveal the blind spot, inaccessible to our field of vision. A broad corpus of his works retraces the Wild race of the human species to impose its systems of measurement on the world and bring the universe back to it.
The dual heartbeat of breathing in and breathing out, of assimilation and expulsion of the human eye is there at the heart of Evariste Richer’s oeuvre. A fertile overlap between a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities and the mental mechanics of Conceptual Art, the artist’s work somehow grasps the current debates and theories deriving from the Anthropocene, meaning the testing of man as the geocentric force of the universe.
Excerpts from “To the moon and back” text by Florence Ostende in the 2014 Marcel Duchamp Prize catalogue.