RichaR
RichaR, working as RIKXECOM, is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves between photography, digital art, mixed media, tactile work, writing, and contemporary abstraction. His images begin with close observation of natural forms, especially tropical plants, monarch butterflies, honeybees, and changing light. Rather than reproducing those subjects directly, he transforms photographs and memories into layered abstract works.
RichaR grew up in a French-speaking household where education, literature, and art were valued. His mother, Lise, fostered a lasting interest in reading and creativity, while French remained his primary language until adolescence. Writing later became an important parallel practice, shaped by a bilingual perspective and a desire to bring image and language together. He recently completed his first book, The Continuum of Light, a handwritten 133-page autobiographical manuscript that includes sixty-seven photographs of works from across his artistic life.
Drawing became especially significant during childhood hospital stays related to Marfan syndrome, scoliosis, and kyphosis. While immobilized in a Stryker suspension frame between surgeries, he used an attached metal tray as a drawing surface. The experience developed habits of patience, concentration, and close looking that have remained central to his work.
Nature is both subject and working environment. For more than three decades, RichaR has cultivated tropical gardens at his Florida homes, using the gardens as sites for photography and ongoing observation. Milkweed planted to attract monarch butterflies, flowering plants visited by bees, palms, and shifting sunlight all enter the work. A photograph may later be digitally reworked and printed or developed into an abstract composition on materials including canvas, aluminum, and acrylic glass.
The garden-based works are not simply environmental documentation. RichaR is interested in the formal possibilities of color, texture, movement, and transformation. Monarch and bee images, for instance, become starting points for abstract interpretations that retain traces of their origins while moving away from literal representation. He describes the work in direct terms: “Colorful. Natural. Contemporary abstract.”
Although Gustav Klimt’s use of gold has resonated with him, RichaR emphasizes self-directed experimentation over imitation. As a teenager working in a sign shop, he used metallic 24K gold foil, and later recognized its potential as part of his own visual vocabulary. Photography, electronics, digital processes, and emerging technologies have similarly become tools for extending, rather than replacing, the artist’s hand and perspective.
His process is flexible. Many ideas arrive at night or in the interval between sleeping and waking, so he keeps pen and paper nearby to record them. A typical day often begins in the garden with a camera, followed by work at the computer on whichever project feels most immediate. When he needs distance from a piece, he steps away rather than forcing it.
RichaR’s work is intended to leave interpretive space for the viewer. He does not prescribe a single message, preferring that people bring their own memories and associations to an artwork. His goal is modest and clear: to make work that rewards attention and offers a moment of reflection through nature, color, and abstraction.
