The Art of James Riches
I have been an admirer of James Riches art since my first encounter with his work in 2005.
James is a fine artist with conspicuous graphic command and a high level of technical accomplishment. There is with James, as there is with the best of artists, a poetic aspect that is distinctive and overrides mere cleverness, facility and style. I have observed James as a student of nature and of the visual world in many of its manifestations and he addresses himself to visual description with great humility and acute sensitivity, but despite his visual acuity and intended fidelity to subject, a profundity emerges that transcends ordinariness.
James work touches upon a range of media primarily works on paper, drawn and painted but including photography, montage, structures and installations (usually in miniature). The work invariably has the refinement associated with printmaking and the intimacy of written and drawn journal notation. But there is a degree of constancy in his subject matter wherein a solitary figure is transfixed in a state of suspended movement within a spatial field. At the moment of writing I can hardly recall another artist who has quite seized this particular imagery and retained it. Georges Seurat attains a variation of this in his exquisite drawings, it is I suppose, a form of symbolism but in both artists it is unencumbered by self-indulgence or didacticism.
Within these works James establishes spaces that might be suburban but they are never concrete, they might be charged by a tremor that is natural or unnatural, physical or metaphysical. I am often reminded of Leonardos deluge drawings in these works wherein the charged energy of nature is rendered with seismographic sensitivity.
The figure within the majority of these drawings is as much an absence or negative space as he is a presence. Sometimes he stands but he is usually levitating, shimmering in a sitting posture as if he is summoned by a natural or unnatural force elsewhere; the interpretation could be existential, transcendental or spiritual.
I have on occasions asked James about the little man captured in these works in a state of sublime arrest and his answer has never quite been satisfying, as if he himself is not quite sure what he has found or what he is drawn to. A lesser artist would be more certain, the better artist can never know precisely or absolutely the nature of his or her quarry. James is a figurative artist, but the obscurity of his aesthetic is profoundly abstract and his intuitive sense that beauty and the truth of things can be found with such modest elements is an encouragement within a culture awash with high resolution visual banality.
At times I have detected something of Peter Booths abject and solitary men in James work and at others Mike Parrs integrating and disintegrating self, and James himself will be wise to all his influences. But because the arena of his attentions and indeed his meditations is small, James addresses his concerns with an illustrators humility and intensity and this has given his work its gentle power and its resonance within his privileged audience.
Godwin Bradbeer
February 2011
